Edible cities: Landscape architect Phoebe Lickwar on post-pandemic public spaces and urban agriculture
What would our cities look like if agriculture was systematically integrated into the urban fabric?
By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Sitelines
June 14, 2021
Excerpt:
Regarding the food supply, we need to get serious about developing an urban agriculture that is equitable and capable of provisioning the city, not on its own, but in conjunction with other forms of rural agriculture. This is an idea I’ve been exploring in my own research and practice, looking at agroecological systems that have persisted for centuries to understand how we might adapt regenerative practices to build an urban agriculture that is multifunctional and sustaining.
I don’t think we realize how deeply the model of mechanized monocultural agriculture has shape our ideas about landscapes, and even more broadly, about the way we design and manage vegetated urban spaces. I’m interested in deconstructing this inheritance and developing an alternative vision for urban landscapes that will feed us both literally and figuratively.
Regarding schools, one of the things I wish we had in place before COVID was the ability to pivot to outdoor learning environments to keep schools open and to keep parents working. Flexible outdoor spaces designed to accommodate learning could have greatly eased the limitations on educational institutions. The pressure on parents this past year has been enormous with school closures. Many parents, primarily women, left the workforce. I heard about communities that were able to move to outdoor learning but our city’s schools did not have this kind of flexibility. The outdoor spaces of schools, and even universities, were underutilized as learning environments despite their capacity to keep schools open and parents working. I see this equally as a failure of investment and a failure of imagination.
