France: Can Urban Farming In The Paris Region Feed The Local Population?
north border of Paris. Photo by Martha Cramer.
Residents may join any one of some 140 such city farming associations within the city alone, with surrounding cities tripling or quadrupling that amount.
By Mark Cramer, the author of Old Man on a Green Bike: Chronicles of a Self-Serving Environmentalist, which contains a chapter on urban agriculture.
When we first moved to Paris in 2000, we found an apartment near a street called “Maraîchers” in the 20th district. As a methodical learner of the French language, I was surprised to have never seen the word. I discovered it meant “market farmers” or urban farmers. We looked around us but could not find a single farm.
A local historian told us that the maraîchers thrived within the core of Paris, until they were pushed out during the dubious urban renewal period beginning after the second world war.
Back in the early 2000s, just across the ring road in cities of Bagnolet and Montreuil, we discovered classic French intensive gardens, including jardins solidaires organized by guerrilla farmers in empty lots. Paris is quite a small city, so its first ring of suburb cities would be the equivalent of Queens across from Manhattan.
Today Paris strives to be a carbon-neutral city, drastically reducing its dependency on motorized transport. The subsequent realignment of the control of space, involving more room for pedestrians and bicycles, and less for cars and trucks, includes space for productive gardening. If reducing the emissions impact of trucked-in produce is a goal, then many more gardens need to spring up.
The measures to expand “shared gardens” are significant, as seen in an official letter to the public from the Paris municipality:
In the letter we learn the how-to for forming and developing shared gardens. Done through associations, the expansion of urban farming is based on both ecology and conviviality. Residents may join any one of some 140 such city farming associations within the city alone, with surrounding cities tripling or quadrupling that amount.
Urban agriculture is given a boost in this dense city thanks to the Green Hand Charter (Charte Main Verte), a program allowing Parisians to establish community gardens on public land in collaboration with the municipality.
“Paris, A Sustainable Food City” plan not only involves expanding urban agriculture but “a shift in behaviors and habits towards more virtuous diets with less meat” and supporting “local short supply chains” through the Association of Community Supported Agriculture (AMAP: Association de Mantien de l’Agriculture Paysanne) in order to sustain food self-sufficiency. (See Paris Climate Action Plan, pp 51-55)
Currently the average supply distance of food in Paris is 660 kilometers, and 18% of the city’s carbon emissions are due to household food consumption. The current expansion of urban agriculture blends with short-supply chain delivery of produce through the AMAPs and encouragement to consume produce in season.
With space in high demand, creative options are only as limited as the public imagination.
For example, new gardens are sprouting up in the below-ground open tunnels once used for a ring-line Paris train, the Little Belt (La Petite Ceinture).
In a city where back yards are rare, rooftop gardens are no longer futuristic dreams. For example, the Paris Institute for Life, Food, and Environmental Sciences began a large rooftop garden in the core of the city, covering more than 8,000 square feet and using organic “bio” methods and even testing the levels of pollution in fruit and vegetables.
The world’s largest rooftop garden just opened in Paris this past summer on the roof of the Paris Exhibition Center, with a goal of supplying the local population. The utopian goal is to provide 100% food coverage at a regional level, but this would require an active political shift from global to local production.
Local residents will be allowed to lease their own plots.
Working on the potential of sustainable local organic agriculture is the Ferme de Paris (Paris Farm). It is not only a pedagogical center but a stimulus for local residents to establish their own produce production. Located in the Forest of Vincennes, just outside the eastern city limits but administered by the City of Paris, this farm also includes farm animals and grazing fields, in all covering more than 12 acres, but reachable by public transportation.
A wide array of motivational displays include beekeeping in parks, squads of sheep and goats that mow the lawns of parks or apartment complexes, and above-ground gardens such as the Promenade Plantée above old train tracks in the 12th district, which inspired Manhattan’s High Line.
The cooperative Les Jardiniers à Vélo (the Bicycle Gardeners) offers multiple services, from gardening to creative technical guidance, using the bicycle as the mode of transport, in line with its commitment to low-impact transport of both equipment and produce.
The casual observer may see the two movements, urban farming and bicycle transportation as moving forward in different lanes, but in fact, they synchronize as part of the larger goal of making the Paris region clean and healthy, and both are contained within the Paris Climate Action Plan.
