Can our cities ever be self-sustaining?

The humble backyard vegie patch is back in vogue in the suburbs of Australia. But can growing spuds and greens in the cities really avert a coming food crisis?

"WE HAVE TWO SETS of needs as humans...sociability and sustenance," says Carolyn Steel, author of Hungry City and lecturer at Cambridge University. "They are in conflict, because the more we cluster together in villages, towns and eventually cities, the further we get from our sources of sustenance."

According to the United Nations Population Fund, more than 50 per cent of humanity now lives in cities and that figure is rising. But while cities are good at generating jobs and providing us with social stimulation, they're less effective at providing food or recycling their energy, water and nutrients.. . .
More at
https://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2011/08/30/3305575.htm

 

How do we wish to define self-sustaining? Do we draw a border around the edge of a city, and not allow any food whatsoever in from the countryside?

Not only would that leave us with a resounding "no," but the idea is absurd.

Most American cities, however, have enough empty and wasted space to produce a large part of their fruit and vegetables. Staple crop and meat production is best left for larger spaces. How much waste do we prevent, and energy save, by localizing what we can localize?

Cities aren't going to go away. The First World is not going to return to the 10th century. To some degree -- likely less than now -- but to some degree, we do need the products of cities. Who will make the solar panels, refrigerators, irrigation hose, fencing wire, shovels, insulation, pickup trucks, all the things that add up to quality of life? Factories... in cities. Making things is the bailiwick of people who are not engaged in subsistence farming. This whole process of agriculture leading to specialization leading to modernization was in 7th grade history texts.

The big question, then, is how do we do it all better and more sustainably?

 

Is it necessary to know if cities can become really sustainable or not? We simply have to try anyway.
At least because of fuel- and food prices going up. And even if this generation doesn't see the need to change, we have to increase the common knowledge, so our children will know how to grow food and be more self-sufficient.

I do think cities can be much more sustainable, though: Turn every yard, balcony, flat roof and useless public green patch into a productive unit, reduce the consumption of meat and help farmers around the cities by csa's.

Nice to see Carolyn Steel mentioned here! Last year I was lucky to have her as a teacher at 'Food and Urban Development', a post-academic course at the university.

Many projects she mentioned were in the area of NewYork and London, where 'local' meant a 100 mile radius from the cities' centres. When you look at the question like that, there are many opportunities to make cities more sustainable.

In the part of the Netherlands where I live for example, wastewater is used to make biogas, vegetable-fruit and garden waste is being collected by the city and composted, cities are encouraging people and housing corporations to use solarenergy.

(In the meantime we have one of the most chemical-intensive types of agriculture close by: flower-bulb industry, so imagine to turn that into permaculture-systems...)

 

Yes but it will take social change / development as well as architects / engineers willing to work towards it not just for money.

 

One sentence, Pakanohida, and I'm off on a dozen tangents.... :rofl:

First: Architects and engineers are mostly idiots and scoundrels. The first type are the type I've run across in my years in the construction industry. Not once have I been a part of a construction project that did not have to be redesigned in the field by us building it, in order to comply with the laws of physics. The scoundrels, like Daniel Libeskind, inflict visual atrocities on cities (like this one - one might think to put vertical walls in an art museum, but what do I know?) to demonstrate the gullibility of the planning departments and councils. But, it's only that 99% of them who give the rest a bad name, which brings me to tangent number two....

No one listens to architects and engineers even when they're talking sense. There's been a group of them out there for several years now -- Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth -- doing their damnedest to poke holes in the government fairy tale with solid science and good engineering knowledge, with little apparent success.

Third tangent: whence comes the notion that people should work for no money? It reminds me of bosses who would say things to me like "You're just here for a paycheck!" as if it were a bad thing. Perennial smartass that I am, I'd reply, "Stop paying me and see how long I keep coming to work!" That's when they'd inform me that I was a smartass. Imagine advertising a job on Craigslist as: hard work, manual labor, 60 hours a week -- Pay is oodles of personal satisfaction! :bear:

Anyway, point being, a guy's gotta keep a roof over his head, food and booze in the fridge, gas in the car, and all the other crap we're not all quite ready to give up just yet. Hence the paycheck. And that's why, Tangent Four --

-- Social change! There is only one thing in history that has affected social change, and that's money. Why are people using less gasoline now? Because it's getting expensive. That's also why people are finally buying more efficient cars. Utility rates go up, people use less. Rockefeller's money financed Prohibition. New York banks funded the Communist overthrow of the tsar, and later, Hitler. Etc., ad infinitum. I dare anyone to give me an example of any sweeping social change in modern history that didn't have dirty money behind it.

Ah, it would be wonderful if everyone could see the future, and act in something a little more enlightened than enlightened self interest! But alas, I fear saving humanity from itself will require manipulating (such a dirty word!) the basest of emotions.

So then, to bring it back round to topic. How do we make our way profitable, and the old bad ways less profitable? Or at the minimum, the appearance of such? That should be the easy part. 8) Rising fuel prices being passed on to rising food prices in the stores are already helping greatly.

 

In answer to the topic question, yes. They sure could be!

Would a lot of people want to be sustainable? No, not a chance. "I refuse to wear a jumper when I can turn the aircon on". Plus to be truly sustainable, a lot of poorly designed buildings would have to be destroyed due to becoming ovens.

Could small cities be food-friendly in a short period of time? Yes, get rid of a lot the grass (in unused parks), charge residents small sums to eat from it, employ local government (and volunteer) workers to maintain it from the rates already in place.

 

Iran, 1979.
Meiji Restoration.

 

Creation of the wheel

Hopi Nation exodus prior to moving to the SW corner of North America (they walked around the entire world, literally)

The Pacific Islanders leaving Java and other areas of Asia and settling of the Pacific Rim (Archeological and anthropological evidence as well as genetic testing of sweet taters and other foods)

People of Southern Japan moving to South America during a volcano eruption some few hundred thousand years ago (Archeological and anthropological evidence).

The original ones that carved a boat and moved to Australia from Asia.



Those are all hugely sweeping changes in our human history without $$$ behind them.

 

Iran... can we ever be sure the CIA hasn't been involved? The remote possibility exists, but in either case, coups d'etat aren't what I was referring to.

You and me got an altogether different idea of what constitutes modern history, methinks.

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I'll be a little more specific, like I should have been in the prior post: in the Western world, 20th century. My apologies if that sounds like changing the rules of the challenge, but we do not now live in the Stone Age or 19th century feudal Japan.

 

Well, human tools now date back to 1.76 million years, so I guess it is all relative.

 

No I don't think cities can be self sustaining. I am yet to see anywhere that is reliant on broadscale agriculture and fossil fuel ever get anywhere near what is "self sustainable" and the way society is arrarnged, never will it be.

When you look back in history, agriculture meant a boon in population. More disease, famines etc. If you look at the short history of horticulture, which came after the hunter gatherer stage in human evolution, that seemed to be the most desirable. Why do you think the bronze age ended? Because they cut down all the trees used to burn to extract the bronze. Dark ages. Of course when fossil fuels came into being and then later introduced into agriculture (the green revolution, not the best way to describe it I beleive as it used more fuels in agriculture) things got to a point where we will always be using more than is sustainable. Imagine the inputs for machinery, people, water and fertiliser needed to feed a lot of people. That in turn requires more land and inputs to sustain the people that run the agriculture. Which in turn produces more people. People breed when food is plentiful and that is the cause of most of our problems. Too many people and this idiotic adherence to economic growth which relies heavily on increasing population. More consumers. Hope you get my drift.

What is needed is not sustainable living (can't be done the way we use resources at the moment) but regenerative approaches to the earth and its people. This is where permaculture is great. Smaller scale enterprises, a way to heal the earth etc. Of course this will not happen until we are forced to do it and get used to the idea that life as we know it will never be "self sustainable".

 

The CIA definitely weren't in control of any of it. Also, you did say 'sweeping social change' - I'd consider Khomeni's new Iran to contain some significant sweeping social change.

Mabo land rights.
Civil Rights in Australia.
Destruction of White Australia policy.

Meiji isn't feudal, and in the context of 10,000 years of written history going back 200-300 is relatively modern, IMO.

 

In the late 70's Bill Mollinson visited NYC and saw people raising chickens & veg where ever people could. That has taken off hardcore to rooftops and balconies, in addition there are projects in the works for getting electrcity from the river system around Manhatten Island. I'm willing to wager that if NYC went solar, wind and wave energy in a massive way, it could produce 100% of its own electricity, with out the Nuke plant and Niagra falls helping as it does now. All that's left is the food, and there are plenty of places if you look for it.

 

Which civil rights would those be? We don't have a Bill of Rights. All our implied rights are being proven in court to not actually stand for anything... Anyway...


I don't think cities can sustain themselves - that's why we have urban and regional areas which have developed over time for different purposes.
It's definitely possible to feed a city 'within the city walls', but that would of course require a total shift in behaviour.
More people commute into work in cities than live in them, I still think were better off producing large scale sustenance outside cities, and clustering manufacturing and service industries which can't be localized together.
Sure, we can relocalize manufacturing: increasing everyones transport costs. We could have a specialist cancer hospital in every regional area. But we are better off getting people to commute to a central area for those sorts of services.

 

I am reminded of simple grafiti on the sidewalk in the town of El Cerrito, CA outside the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit, a 165+mph monorail like system) and the graffiti said...

Commute

Work

Commute

Sleep

Commute

Work

Commute...


..and it continues that way for 1 block leading to BART.

 

In my opinion cities are the pustulent sores left when there is a seriously nasty infection of humans on a planet. The Earth can probably deal with an infection that consists of a few major cities across the world supported by a series of smaller villages, but I think we may have gone beyond a mere infection into an insidious cancer that is already consuming the flesh and organs of the planet.

Permaculture is a localised ointment. But it's difficult to see the human infection intentionally reducing it's size, which, I think we all know is the only way we will get back to somewhere near a sustainable population. Anyone who thinks we can have increasing population, or even a population at current levels, and a healthy planet is seriously delusional. Will you volunteer yourself for part of the annual human culling?

Until I see clear, fresh, water flowing down the local creek I will insist that cities are unsustainable and stupidly delusional ideas.

So, whilst I agree that we all must practice sustainable living [read permaculture] where ever we are, until there is some serious social revolution (or as I suspect more realistically, some kind of leap in human evolution) cities are just going to continue to fester and damage Mother Earth.

Don't kid yourself, little bits of 'more sustainable' aren't going to do much. If you really care, you need to be the entire change that you wish to see in the world. Personally, I don't see how that can include living in a modern city.

However the cards fall you owe it to yourself to do everything that you can and be as honest to yourself as you can.

So my answer is...

For smaller provincial cities, yes.
For multi-millions, surely not.
For Western cities, ya dreamin'.

 

That dirty creek water is etched into my mind all over Brisbane.

As you should well know, water can be cleaned by plants and many municipalities (and maybe a Council or two) will treat road and storm water runoff, naturally. This requires a Roads and Drains department to not be stuck in the dark ages, eager to try something new (well, used to be new 20 years ago). Not only that, slowed water prevents erosion and reduces flooding further down the line.

But no, part of my employ is to remove trees from the edge of drains because they are in the way. I've reduced canopies to allow sunlight to 'dry' the soil in ex-creekbeds. A large tree could transpire 500L a day but that kind of natural pump isn't considered, in fact, to mention is heresy. Water is to be moved to the ocean or creek at maximum speed, no exceptions.

I'd love to see or be involved in a more natural approach to stormwater treatment and water slowing, but I think a few things stand in the way. Precious space - a bog pond could be a house site. Development costs - cheap, nasty and proven wins out. Mosquitoes - potential disease vectors (even if the ponds were stocked with fish). Drowning - think of the children. Plants and natural systems - what are they good for...nothing, plus they're dirty and icky.

 

Well, wouldn't the correct way to handle this is to first determine the size city we are talking about, and then figure out how, instead of how it can't be done. That's the only way I can see a metamorphosis of this topic occur.

My city, it is totally possible, my city has only 4500 people roughly. People grow chickens in town, there is a pasture "winter lake" with cattle and sheep in it, a river.. very very very possible.

NYC would be harder, but we could break it down by borough, such as Manhattan Island vs. the Bronx. However, Central Park, Battery Park, and the Bridges would be good places to start growing along with rooftops & porches. Rooftops can grow soybeans, and chickens for protein.

Just thoughts.

:think:

 

There is a thing to consider: the welfare class. In the US, it amounts to some 50 million people who live on government checks, and have never worked a day in their lives.

It's certainly not sustainable. Without the checks in the mail, however... the cities burn to the ground in a week.

No one has a solution to this that isn't "racist" or "genocidal."

 

Can our cities ever be self-sustaining?

The short answer is, yes. The slightly longer version is, yes they can, but as to whether they ever will is wholly dependant on the people that live in them, those that want to live in them, and those that rely upon them - in my estimation, about 85% of Earth's human population.

In order for our cities (read: urban areas) to ever become 'self-sustaining' (in the true sense of the term), global humanity needs to undergo a radical shift in the way it thinks, and then acts.

One example of what this shift in collective consciousness could look like on a bioregional level, is graphically portrayed in Urban Ecology's The Shadow Plans of the Tandanya Bioregion.

How do we undergo this transformation in collective consciousness? We have to start at the core of the problem. That is, we have to understand '...the often overlooked fact that nearly all our present ecological problems arise from deep-seated social problems' (Bookchin, 1993). Once we understand this, then we have to act to change it, and fast. Permaculture is one way of achieving this, and from my way of thinking, we are doing a pretty good job. As to whether we (our children, grand children, their children...) have enough time to avert the worst of the looming disaster, only time (and history books of the future) will tell.

Cheerio, Markos