Urban Agriculture and the Right to the City: A Practitioner’s Roadmap

Abstract

This essay approaches urban agriculture from the perspective of an architect and urban farmer/beekeeper practicing bottom-up, participatory design in Oslo. It discusses the motivations for the co-creation of livable, experientially rich, place-making, and inclusive urban agriculture in public space to complement to compact city development. It touches on a few critical dimensions of urban agriculture in public space, which relate to the private and corporate claim on these landscapes, and their potentiality as multifunctional and abundant contributors to sociocultural and ecological diversity, food security, health, and democratic discourse. It also critiques its current aesthetics of impermanence and temporality and questions the notion that the joy and a sense of freedom urban agriculture brings to a community should be built upon and enriched by future development and policy. Rather than a replicable model of urban gardening, what emerges from this essay is a rich collection of stories of regeneration and change and of collective action and cultivation.

It is an Open Access publication, available here (in Norwegian): https://oa.fagbokforlaget.no/index.php/vboa/catalog/book/38.

1 An Increasingly Commercial City

In the contemporary city, municipalities often rent or sublet public space for the benefits of commerce and private profit. Oslo municipality rents street ground and green areas to both commercial and non-commercial organisations. In 2022, during the COVID-19 epidemic, the Oslo Municipality decided to make public space available for free to bring back city life and attract citizens isolating at home to local businesses. The municipality also initiated various tactical urbanism projects, including the temporary closure of streets in the inner-city districts of Grønland and Gamle Oslo, where it installed trees and created temporary hay meadows. For a few summer months, Oslo residents saw how the city’s public spaces could be transformed to include cultivation and urban nature. They also observed some of the benefits to commerce in and around these spaces, improved safety perceptions, and streets made more livable by the newly planted small but leafy vegetation.

Today, many municipalities operate both as commercial property developers and managers. Various public enterprises must deliver profits to the municipal coffers, and this means that residents must pay to use the city’s public spaces. In Oslo, it is the Agency for Urban Environment that rents streets and public spaces. If a district wants to run an urban agricultural initiative or other noncommercial project on public land, it must pay a rent. Securing a reasonable rent is often dependent on finding a municipal worker who is knowledgeable and supportive of community-oriented initiatives.

A recent example of Oslo municipality’s support for noncommercial purposes is the 2022 Selvbyggeren (Self-builder) art project realized in the district of Økern by the Kunstnerboligforeningen (Artists’ Housing Association). The project consists of a temporary pavilion, which was realized on a lawn near a local school, on land rented from the municipality on preferential conditions. The pavilion has been functioning as a canteen for local artists and a place for cultural arrangements. The project idea is rooted in the district’s historical background as a productive part of the city with industry and manufacturing workshops, which has been gradually erased by private real estate actors. Through joint work, materials, and artistic reflection, the Self Builder has given physical expression to the collective memory of Økern as part of the productive city. It has also inspired a discussion on the right to the city. When urban spaces become a commodity, those who can pay the most will have the first right to define their program and in turn influence both people’s imagination and use of urban spaces. Ironically, this results in internal competition between various departments of city government, illustrate by the the Culture Agency in Oslo municipality paying rent to the Urban Environment Agency for the site.

In her 1958 paper “Downtown is for People,” North American critic Jane Jacobs criticized modernist urban development and warned of its consequences for the quality and inclusiveness of public space.

This is a critical time for the future of the city. All over the country civic leaders and planners are preparing a series of redevelopment projects that will set the character of the center of our cities for generations to come. … What will the projects look like? They will be spacious, park-like, and uncrowded. They will feature long green vistas. They will be stable and symmetrical and orderly. They will be clean, impressive, and monumental. They will have all the attributes of a well kept, dignified cemetery. … These projects will not revitalize downtown; they will deaden it. For they work at cross-purposes to the city. They banish the street. They banish its function. They banish its variety. (Jacobs, 1958:126)

In today’s neo-liberal society, urban development is most often profit-driven, but Jacob’s reflections are still valid.

The remarkable intricacy and liveliness of down- town can never be created by the abstract logic of a few men. Downtown has had the capability of providing something for everybody only because it has been created by everybody. (Jacobs, 1958:130)

Jacobs believed that citizens should be the ultimate experts on urban development and that their involvement and ability to inform the design of cities was necessary to ensure their success in attracting a diversity of users. Her work has inspired today’s vision for a sustainable city where people can use public spaces on their own terms, buy locally produced vegetables in public market squares, and participate in city life with a great diversity of other people. In the Modernist city, natural processes were excluded from the urban landscape. Today, we understand that people need access to rich experiences of both wild nature and man-made landscape. They need the scents and colors, a dandelion pushing its way through the asphalt, and the sound of forest birds and pollinators finding their way to the city center from shrub to shrub. To many, this is the main motivation for starting an urban agriculture project. By growing their own food, urban farmers learn that making the city productive requires sweat and tears, and that it is essential to human well-being and happiness. Gradually, they also gain a deeper understanding of climate change and the importance of self-reliance and local economies in counteracting the negative impact of global economics and lifestyles reliant on cheap imports of food, energy, and goods from developing countries.

2 From Non-Place to the City’s Food Platter

A livable city encompasses a variety of public spaces, from the park of the Royal Palace, a public garden, city’s squares, roadside strips, power lines easements, and green spaces along railway tracks. Many of these patches of land have long traditions of agricultural production. During World War II, the park around the Oslo royal palace was used to grow potatoes, and residents and commuters cultivated vegetables on patches of soil along many railway lines.

Today, establishing an urban agriculture project within a well functioning system of productive landscapes must necessarily be supportive of a diversity of users, and it should involve participatory processes. In many places, consideration for other residents (secondary and tertiary users) will require that their design be adapted to the surroundings, which in return will give the urban garden unique character and identity. It will require re-thinking past decisions and choosing radically different ways forward, as governments have done in the past to address changes prompted by global and local events.

In the autumn of 1960, after WWII’s rationing policies came to an end, Norway lifted its state-mandated limits to the purchase of passenger cars, starting a rapid increase in the number of registered automobiles. From 1960 to 1964, the car fleet doubled to just over 410,000 cars.¹ Another priority was to create new housing. In many places, it took several decades for municipalities to remedy the post-war housing shortage. At Ammerud, in the Groruddalen district of Oslo, negotiations with landowners began in the late 1940s, but it was not until the mid-1960s that Ammerud was re-zoned as a residential area. Developed as dormitory towns, these new residential districts featured spaces in support of basic human functions, except for workplaces, which were in industrial areas at the bottom of the valleys or in the city center.² Public and open spaces were designed functionally, rather than ecologically, and uses were carefully separated. The food system was also designed for efficiency and economic viability.

Today, we understand the need for a city to be authentically multifunctional and integrate sites where people can produce most of what they eat locally. Two major challenges exist to advancing this city vision. In urban and peri-urban areas, topsoil has been depleted, and Modernist city district land-use plans lack space for food processing or light industry (see also Chapter 13). This requires the re-zoning of housing districts to include these productive uses, which often finds opposition from politicians or administration.

Several European cities have ambitions to make the city self-sufficient within a few decades. Many cities like Barcelona and Hamburg have joined the Fab City Global Initiative, a network of municipalities working together to help manage production of urban services at the scale of a city’s’ bioregion, a geographical area defined not by political borders but by ecosystems.³ Improving urban nature and food production in the city is part of the work needed, but it also requires re-integrating permanent agricultural areas within its limits. It will also become increasingly necessary to regulate coexistence between residents and the urban farming communities. Transportation access, noise, and safety are topics that should be addressed and resolved, and new forms of cohabitation must be explored. How should the urban agriculture transitions take place? What should industry and agriculture look like in the cityscape? Can people in the city help co-create the productive, inclusive city of the future?

3 What’s Going on in Town: Participation and Form

Temporality is a fundamental premise for urban agriculture in public space and has a visual expression in the familiar planter box, a stackable, replicable building element, easy to assemble, install, and move.

The idea behind temporality has very often been to challenge familiar beliefs about how the city should function and make it possible to imagine other ways of doing things. Today, temporality is often a requirement rather than an opportunity. And many who live in the city are beginning to question the fact that everything that creates joy and a sense of freedom in a city should be temporary. When we participated with the Planning and Building Agency of Oslo’s municipality in the preparation of an action plan to increase urban life in the districts of Grønland and Tøyen, inhabitants proved tired of participation and temporary measures and asked instead for investments and lasting improvements. Residents living in disadvantaged communities are frequently targets of extensive participation processes, often without clear consequences for their inclusion. Their engagement often leads to experimental projects and temporary greening installations that fail to motivate their continued involvement and sense of stewardship (see the discussion of our case studies from this area in Chapter 6).

4 Developing an Urban Agriculture Toolbox for Community: The Idea and the Process

When tasked with creating a toolbox for urban agriculture in public space, the authors concluded that toolboxes are worthless if they are merely a collection of objects and solutions, disconnected from the unique physical and sociocultural contexts and practices unfolding within a community. Given the short timeframe of the Cultivating Public Space project, developing a toolbox for agriculture in city squares and parks based on limited knowledge and experiences from pilot projects did not seem to sufficiently acknowledge the diversity of contexts and locations urban agriculture inhabits and grows in. A manual also seemed unhelpful to those who, alone or together with others, are already engaged in urban agriculture and have clear ideas about its aesthetics and performance.

Studying in their investigation of urban agriculture projects both outside and inside of Norway, the authors found copious evidence of the kind of systemic and personal transformations urban agriculture has helped generate, and of the challenges urban farmers face in activating productive landscapes. Over the past few years, the Oslo municipality has become more welcoming and accommodating of urban agriculture, yet public enterprises rarely communicate or join forces to assist urban agriculture growers. Many sites have started as either a leisure activity or a social enterprise, and agreements with the municipality regarding commercial projects on public land do not yet exist. Most recently, a growing awareness of land policy due to climate-neutrality commitments has raised the need for strategic plans to make more public land available for cultivation.

The functional segregation of the modern city does not help local food production. Until now, spatial planning in the compact city has prioritized housing, services, and infrastructural investments for resilience and climate change/emergency preparedness, over food cultivation in public spaces. In Oslo, the redevelopment of the district of Trosterud has been an exception. There, the relocation of an older allotment garden to a new area was a sign that the municipality felt compelled to offer more spaces for urban agriculture and to fulfill its commitment to a more sustainable city. Such initiatives suggest a green shift toward the collective cultivation, harvesting and processing of crops grown in city or peri-urban areas. Today, many urban agriculture projects are either private or run by volunteers in agreement or partnership with the municipality, and the relationship has been managed at the local level, in idiosyncratic ways, but coherently with the community’s unique resources and abilities. The authors imagine that in the future, as more people will grow and sell their products locally or outside the cities, uniform guidelines and regulations may be needed to balance public access and private claims.

Many examples of urban agriculture in public space we have encountered during this project have been activism-driven, temporary, self-constructed, and often poorly maintained. Creating a toolbox for agriculture in the city’s public space requires considerations of processes, motivations, context, form, and also operation overtime. Understanding a place’s sociocultural conditions is crucial, as place identity and people’s wishes about the appearance of the physical surroundings will create expectations about the way urban agriculture is designed and how it looks. The wishes and ambitions of neighborhood residents in Ullevål Hageby in Oslo will be very different from those of Grønland Square users, but not necessarily in the way one would expect. Many would think that the residents of Ullevål, a historic Garden City district near the city’s largest hospital, would want a conservative design adapted to the buildings, while residents in Grønland might accept a self-built, colorful, and less permanent urban agriculture design. This may well be the opposite.

How can one balance the ownership, commitment, and vision of urban agriculture initiators and society’s need for coherence and standardization in the planning, design, and implementation of urban agriculture projects? Both perspectives are important to the future of urban agriculture in the Norwegian city, as in many other places worldwide. We decided to illustrate and share these stories as evidence of the diversity of perspectives values, practices, and visions that underlie the creation of food and community-producing public landscapes in our cities.

We have made our toolbox a graphic novel not only to make it more engaging and accessible for different users but also to give it the colorful and joyful expression of an urban garden. There is no linear guide or a point-by-point form to follow. It’s about people and relationships.

Artoonist Esben Slaatrem Titland and the Oslo-based architecture firm Fragment have worked to compile knowledge from Cultivating Public Space research project, reading through and synthesizing findings from literature and interviews of urban farmers in Oslo. Even though as architects we were asked to develop a design manual, or even architectural solutions, it became clear early on that design guidelines and architectural responses might not be a suitable method for facilitating lasting, resilient urban agricultural sites in the diverse neighborhoods of the Norwegian capital.

In 2019, Arild Eriksen and Deni Ruggeri led a continuing education course at NMBU where students helped imagine new cultivation projects in public spaces for four iconic urban areas (see Chapter 9 in this book). The students’ urban agriculture in public space should be site-specific and that the formal solutions should also adapt to the sociocultural context of every place. To successfully achieve the goal to grow most of what we consume within the city’s bioregional context, urban agriculture must be given a unique and lasting character, tell a rich and compelling story, and be embraced by both municipal agencies and community members, who share the responsibility to steward them.

Conflicts between an urban agriculture project and a neighborhood suggest that it is not just good or bad design that people respond to. For urban farmers, a well established project can appear as a victory and as proof that they can also use the city’s public spaces. For others, the project may appear as privatization of public space (see the discussion of publicness of urban agriculture in Chapter 4).

The toolbox (whose excerpts are presented in Figs. 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5) illustrates both process and form, ideas and ambitions, unique experiences, shared setbacks, and replicable strategies, but it does so in the form of “storied knowledge”⁴ rather than abstraction. These stories have the power to move and motivate people to get involved, something that planning and strategic documents do not.

Fig. 10.1

Helene Gallis talks about neighborhood cultivation in public spaces at Grønland, Oslo

Page from the cartoon Byens Bønder by Fragment and Esben S. Titland. Fagbokforlaget 2023 (p. 43) [A comment for the publisher: please use the translated high-resolution versions of all illustrations delivered in a separate folder]

Fig. 10.2

“Because things go a little slower here.” Urban agriculture with young people in Oslo’s suburbs

Page from the cartoon Byens Bønder by Fragment and Esben S. Titland. Fagbokforlaget 2023 (p. 45)

Fig. 10.3

The city has many public spaces that you don’t immediately think could be used for the purposes of urban agriculture

Page from the cartoon Byens Bønder by Fragment and Esben S. Titland. Fagbokforlaget 2023. (p. 30)

Fig. 10.4

Decisions have consequences

Page from the cartoon Byens Bønder by Fragment and Esben S. Titland. Fagbokforlaget 2023 (p. 66)

Fig. 10.5

Different places require different solutions

Page from the cartoon Byens Bønder by Fragment and Esben S. Titland. Fagbokforlaget 2023 (p. 35)

The toolbox is entitled “Byens Bønder” (“City’s Farmers”) and was published open access with Fagbokforlaget in May 2023. It is available in the Norwegian version here: https://oa.fagbokforlaget.no/index.php/vboa/catalog/book/38 (Fig. 10.6).

Fig. 10.6

The cover of the published book. (Photo: Fragment)