Green Towns and Cities - Theme Cities: Solutions for Urban Problems - page 131

to maintain more natural conditions than are found in most European regions—al-
though some would prefer to see such policies abolished on human safely grounds.

4﻽6 From Green Conservation to Green Production

Some policy changes in urban areas that return the environment to more natural
conditions are not, however, only carried out only or conservation, recreational
or health reasons. Increasingly, it is recognized that the land in and around cities
should also be used more productively, for the growth of the supermarkets that
dominate food sales have spatially extensive food supply chains, which means that
few products come from the local area, while the food stocks carried only last a few
days. So any breakdown in the transport system preventing new supplies arriving
means that food stocks will diminish rapidly in cities, usually less than a week. This
potential food supply problem is one that the Transition Town movement (Chap. 7)
is particularly concerned with, leading them to stress the need for more local food
supply sources. In the past century edible species were usually not planted or were
removed in parks and open areas because their fruit leaves a mess, or attracts van-
dals. However more and more cities are developing what amounts to new harvest-
ing policies . For example, some cities now harvest trees with fruits, as seen in Ro-
sario's park system in Argentina, separating these areas off at harvest time to avoid
vandalism. The interest in organic crops has also encouraged many more people
with gardens to grow food. New urban bye-laws have allowed private urban garden-
ers to use the unwanted gardens of willing homeowners to grow vegetables, often
sharing the crop with the owners—while volunteer citizen groups have emerged to
harvest unwanted fruit from trees in private gardens. More generally, some cities
have developed what amount to ecological reserves , either small areas within the
city or in their hinterland that are open to visitors who enjoy the open space and
ecological variety. In addition school gardens have been added to school yards in
an attempt to help children understand how crops grow, part of the increasing adop-
tion of more green environmentally aware practices in their curriculum that is the
subject of geography education topics by Williams and Lee ( 2006 ). A few western
cities also have farms within their municipal area, incidentally one of the often
forgotten features of Howard's Garden City idea. One of the best examples of this
urban farm trend can be seen in G￶teburg, where 60 farms cover 2700 ha. These
farms are working, profitable enterprises, but also carry out functions useful for the
surrounding urban residents, such as allowing school children to visit and study
farming methods and animals, providing pick-your-own berry and vegetable areas,
as well as riding schools. In G￶teburg much of this land was bought up by the city
decades earlier under a land banking scheme, so it did not have to pay high prices.
Land around cities is often held for years by speculators, hoping for windfall profits
when rural land is changed into urban.
A new appreciation of the need for agriculture within and around urban areas
has also emerged, with many authors stressing the freshness of local supplies from
farms (Mougeot 2005 ; Darren 2009 ; Mogk 2010 ). Some represent survivals of older