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Urban Gleaning: Promoting Food Security Through Opportunistic Design Strategies

DOI

https://doi.org/10.7275/fabos.669

Publication Date

2016

Abstract

In an effort to improve food literacy, food security, and food access, concerned

citizens have, over the course of the past several decades, developed new types

of landscapes for urban gleaning. While these design interventions vary in

scope and approach, they share a common fundamental desire: to invite others

to join in a harvest picked from the city. This paper addresses the broad context

of urban gleaning through the specific lens of two case studies in

Northampton, MA, and suggests that these types of nontraditional agricultural

sites have the potential to radically restructure cityscapes. Moreover, while

urban gleaning efforts rarely engage the design and planning disciplines in a

formal way, this paper argues that future urban agriculture efforts could benefit

from a more integrated design approach. In so doing, new types of food

provisioning systems, designed to fit into urban wastescapes, might offer even

more productive returns for the community engagement, food culture, and

food security of the future city.

In an effort to improve food literacy, food security, and food access, concernedcitizens have, over the course of the past several decades, developed new typesof landscapes for urban gleaning. While these design interventions vary inscope and approach, they share a common fundamental desire: to invite othersto join in a harvest picked from the city. This paper addresses the broad contextof urban gleaning through the specific lens of two case studies inNorthampton, MA, and suggests that these types of nontraditional agriculturalsites have the potential to radically restructure cityscapes. Moreover, whileurban gleaning efforts rarely engage the design and planning disciplines in aformal way, this paper argues that future urban agriculture efforts could benefitfrom a more integrated design approach. In so doing, new types of foodprovisioning systems, designed to fit into urban wastescapes, might offer evenmore productive returns for the community engagement, food culture, andfood security of the future city.Informal urbanism has gained important disciplinary ground in the pastdecade, emerging as a popular design method that encourages, among otherthings, engaged citizenship, visionary planning, utopian social processes andradical self-reliance (Douglas, 2011; Hou, 2010). Within this emergentdisciplinary sphere, the design, planting and stewardship of informal gardensin the public realm can be understood as a sub-genre with unique applicationsfor urban engagement. Unlike the highly specialized and formalized urbanfarming approaches of cities and towns, informal agriculture efforts on urbanlands tend to be fueled by ground-up, opportunistic, and unsanctionedinterventions (Reynolds, 2008). Because of these qualities, the design andorganizational structure of these informal interventions remain relativelyunderexplored within the realm of planning and design disciplines, andinherently more difficult to locate, quantify and understand (Douglas, 2014).The impulse to thread gleaning gardens into the fabric of the city is rooted inthe desire to create opportunities to share food across an urban scale, drawingon volunteer efforts and incorporating leftover or unproductive landscapes(Finn, 2014; McLain et al., 2014). This type of farming can occur on both

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