by Sherwin Lee

Urban agriculture has been a hot topic in the last several years, having been championed by sustainable food activists as a smart new way to get food fresh and local within the city. While we can use existing dilapidated spaces for things like markets, we can take things one step further by also planning spaces to have our food grown directly in the urban environment.  Urban farms have been popping up across the United States in recent years and are even beginning to replace spaces once meant for auto-oriented expressways.

This growing trend represents a desire for increased availability of fresh food in places that have traditionally required higher costs of production and food miles.  Chris Burley, who directs the Hayes Valley Farm project in San Francisco, believes that not enough city dwellers are aware of the ways in which they can grow their own food:

"Our main yield is education," he said.  "We're trying to teach folks about growing their own food on balconies, back yards, open-air parking lots and pavement backyards."

Even in Seattle, growing food in the city hasn't been an entirely new idea.  Neighborhood farms like the Danny Woo Community Garden in Chinatown-International District have helped residents support personal food and dietary needs with their own hands.

InterIm, the neighborhood's community development association, has been looking for other ways to get residents involved with their own food in a sustainable and eco-friendly manner.  The organization is currently looking at turning an abandoned fennel patch on the corner of 7th and Main into an urban agricultural center, which will take into account sustainable practices from construction design, to composting and stormwater runoff.

As our cities grow, the greater our need for fresh food becomes.  Urban farms not only help us adopt more sustainable food systems, but also help us engage our communities by bringing residents together to share in a common delight for food, flowers, and flora.

Sherwin Lee is an architecture and urban planning student at the University of Washington.  He is interested in community and neighborhood development and strongly supports using markets in urban spaces.