My girlfriend in Chicago worked for an org that used empty plots of land in the city as gardens run by the homeless. They'd be paid with the money earned from selling the produce to local restaurants, and they could eat the food too, obviously. Great concept.

https://my.stratos.net/~mmoss/public%...griculture.pdf

"In this article we examine trends in urban agriculture in the United States with a particular focus on the public health potential and pitfalls of urban agriculture. We explore the role of urban agriculture for nutritional health and food security, personal wellness and community betterment, and environmental health. And we suggest policy changes that could favorably advance the potential of urban agriculture for public health benefits in these areas."

City farming can't provide a very large portion of people's diets on a % of calories basis, there just isn't enough land even if you use rooftops and whatnot. However, urban and peri-urban farming can provide a huge portion (like 50%+) of people's fresh fruit and vegetable needs, which is especially helpful because these foods are the most expensive to transport and are otherwise difficult to obtain for poorer people. In eastern Europe people never really stopped growing food in the course of urbanization, and even today there is a substantial amount of food grown in or near the city almost everywhere except in western Europe and the US/Canada.

#1 saying that a city couldn't provide enough food to support its own population based on land space alone is like saying a city couldn't support its population in jobs by not having enough office space. there is absolutely a possibility that a city COULD if they in fact wanted to, be self sufficient with farming. Its just a matter of feasability.

#2 If your professor truly graded you the way that you said they did, they're an idiot. If a student is allowed to choose a topic for a paper and writes the paper using proper english and uses credible sources to support their data and ideas, and the professor grades it based on the fact that THEY believe its unfeasable is ridiculous.

I recommend having a talk with the professor to see how they graded it and on what criteria. If it was for a specific purpose or something and you went out on a limb then thats one thing, but if they gave you a crappy grade because they don't think your idea would work theyre morons. If the wright brothers never ran off that hill, no one would've believed that some huge contraption could fly.

Not really. If you plant corn, a relatively efficient crop, wall to wall, you can feed about 10,000 people who only want to eat corn all day off of a square mile of good land. That's about as dense as Chicago, which ain't exactly all high rises (though it's twice as dense as LA and 3x as dense as Portland; bet all you Portland lovers didn't realize you were living in worse sprawl than LA itself). Start throwing in some crop diversity, maybe some fruit trees or god forbid egg or dairy production, and the numbers just don't work for a city to feed itself, especially if you're going to set aside some of the land for purposes other than food production (this being a city and all). You can grow a lot of food in a city, but you still need grain crops and protein producers that eat grain crops (you're dreaming if you think everyone will just decide to be vegan) outside of the urban area providing the majority of the calories to support anything like urban density. Of course there is some potential for doing thoroughly ridiculous stuff like building farm towers as proposed above, but I don't think anyone with a serious grip on reality and the ability to use a calculator thinks something like that is practical.

+1

Strange coincidence (in my head) but my horticulture professor was just mentioning how it is a shame that most American cities are built upon some of the higher quality crop-land, (near rivers or other water, (at least originally) great soil, flat ground, transportation etc.) and how it is a shame we build buildings on top of such great land. Of course each geographic area would have a varying degree of resources and pollution, so these generalizations do not amount to much. Just a thought, but maybe your professor was saying that if you do not spend time on research he doesn't have to either, so he says, bah bad soil pollution, and bad grade?

Or it could be something else entirely, on some bike forum, and as I know nothing about your paper or anything about the situation I couldn't say. If you are serious about improving your grade maybe you could talk to him about a re-write?

One developing area that is really interesting to me is phytoremediation, which uses plants to suck the heavy metals and other pollutants out of the soil. The plants (which become storage for the pollution) can be properly disposed of and the land is left clean. Then we have tons of places to plant food =)

this thread is worthless without the essay.

There's a heavily polluted (as in never going to be cleaned up) brownfield in north philly where they simply put the crops in boxes elevated from the ground with clean soil.

Corn is also one of the worse crops in terms of nutrient leaching, hardly sustainable.

I remember talking to KRS-One about a year ago and his suggestion was to put apple trees downtown, so if you were hungry you could just pluck an apple... very pleasant dude, not unlike his raps as of the last few years.

that is really similar to something snoop dog said to me in a conversation once

where is this pile of cool looking boxes

That's the island city of Montreal. Ils St. Helen I believe. It was the site for the '67 expo.... It quickly became a very sought after residence complex.

Grow some sticky-icky-icky trees downtown?

like a few years back on germantown avenue?

LOL @ KRS-One and Snoop!

Since the withdrawal of Soviet support in the 90s, Cuba has had to do all sorts of things to keep the people fed. One of these was planting lots of urban gardens everywhere, and getting ordinary people, as well as the military, involved in tending them. There is a great movie out there called "the greening of cuba" for anyone who is interested in learning more about this.

I don't know about abandoned, but close to high-traffic roads, the soil is, indeed polluted and food grown there is generally deemed unhealthy at best, and highly carcinogenic at worst.

The elk burger is soo tasty.