Good idea.

Take out all of the affordable housing for the city's laborers so that you could have farms. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Didn't they try something like that in Cambodia during the 70's?

Hopefully LiG the enforcement here will be by the codebook and not the rifle barrel. I don't think the two are even comparable.

Sadly I don't have time to find the links at the moment, but (infant-sized) projects like this are going on in Detroit, Flint... - as well as better established cities like the City Farm program here in Chicago. I'm working on a Urban Agriculture project right now. Its a good reuse of land, although soil contamination is a big issue that needs to be taken into account which I did not see skimming Geoff's article.

The way I understood it only the already vacant lots would be used for farming. Already condemned buildings could be razed for more farming. The local population remains and maintains the farm and profits from its yields.

I'm just skeptical the residents of Philadelphia's most blighted areas wouldn't be interested in community farming...unless the cash crop was illicit in nature.

There's a reason they're called Philly blunts.

I'm all about green spaces, green roofs and such, but shit like this reminds me of people who have visited Whole Foods one too many times and decided to get "creative."

Especially, with the growth in awareness about food politics and the demand for local, sustainable food, i think it would be amazing to re-purpose our decayed and/or abandoned inner cities along these lines.
Not only could it help to restore the ecological diversity and health of such locales but it would also provide opportunities for job training and economic development..

Maybe they could turn Bucks County back into farmland instead. I could get behind that idea.

living in detroit, i've seen countless student projects like this in the universities. i personally don't find the idea very inspiring in that it's really a "no thought" idea - let empty space revert to farmland, so what? i do think that the idea could have more merit if developed beyond planting crops in empty lots. one idea i've heard floated is using the crops to help rehabilitate brownfield sites. the types of crops you need for brownfield rehab can also be used to produce biofuels, contributing to an emerging industry. i find these possibilities far more interesting than the simplistic renderings of abandoned buildings in cornfields.

btw i believe it is a comprehensive planning issue beyond the scope of architecture proper. i'm always surprised the idea is so popular in architecture schools.

It would be nice to just try new urban strategies in these "decayed" areas. Mixed use, urban infill, multi-level big box stores, roof gardens and terraces, a good proportion of "pocket parks" to buildings, revitalization of older buildings, introduction of educational institutions, etc... These are all pretty effective strategies that have worked in many cities. Combine this with an aggressive campaign of pedestrian-friendly planning and you can have something quite nice.

What this farm proposal is doing is breaking up the "urbanity" of the what a city should be -- urban.

What people should really be targeting with these farm proposals is the suburban sprawl that is really leading to the problems of pollution, traffic, and such.

I agree with jafinder. I don't understand how such uninteresting and uninspiring images could help us architecturally.

actually, i disagree, archmed. cities like detroit need to adopt strategies to shrink; farming is one such, but i'm not sure the best. no amount of urban redevelopment is going to fill up detroit or philadelphia. i'm really advocating for a more comprehensive plan to shrink cities.

Cities have been shrinking and dying for decades. The reason everyone left Detroit is because no one cared anymore.

They all huddled behind places like Southfield, Dearborn, Troy, Sterling Heights, Auburn Hills, St. Claire shores, Livonia, etc creating huge clusterfuck suburban nightmares. Meanwhile, since no one cared about Detroit anymore, it was left there to rot. It's a shame because many of the hundreds of buildings that were demolished could have been rather nice if they were renovated along with the entire areas.

Actually, Philly did a very good job in general. It used to be nasty and they have actually cleaned it up quite a bit. I remember as recently as the early 90s places like South Street and Delaware Ave. where completely trashed.

i agree with Archmed
Philly is actually revitalizing a lot of these so called dead areas where these people are proposing farms

it would never work
first off, the people currently living in these dead areas arent looking to become farmers, especially when their profit would not really be much compared to the labor involved
i live in an area very similar to the pics in the proposal
the reason it is getting revitalized, is because new people are moving in who (like myself) actually have a job and am willing to keep my house from becoming a shithole
the problem is the people who have lived there for generations and hand down their properties to their children
their kids live for next to nothing, and therefore dont have to work
and dont seem to care to keep their houses from becoming anything more than a trashpile


its a nice utopian idea that some rich guys at Penn thought up, but would never work at or live at in a million years
so they naturally assume the poor people will want to live there and work on a farm

tourism...seriously??

this would be a serious step back for a city that is actually on the right path toward cleaning up these dead neighborhoods

though i do admit, i wish i owned the empty lot directly behind me to start a little corn maze

Farming in LA??? Being at the top of the list for pollution, I wonder what the veggies would taste like?

Yeah I don't the homeboys in some of these hoods could really give two good goddamns about how organic their goat cheese and spinach wraps and double skim soy lattes are let alone that they got them in a farm within the city.

They (much like all of us) are interested in the good stuff like working at cool places, possibly advancing their education, buying nice things, living in decent places, and being safe.

Personally, farming as some have already pointed out would not necessarily mean low paying jobs. Depends on what type of farming and what type of crops.
Organic and local food are now commanding a premium in many locations if not for use by the growers than certainly for sale to "Yuppies" at their Farmers Markets and Whole Foods etc.
Plus, certain crops could be turned into bio-fuels, which will continue (most likely, unless OPEC steps in somehow) to draw investment and grow in profitablity...
This does not even address the health or environmental benefits of such locally grown food.

Additionally, alot of work has been done in the last few years showing how bioremediation can be used for "fixing" contaminated soils.

All of these types of "farming" would require and create not just "farming" (dirty, weeding, planting etc) jobs but also, new green technology opportunities....

So.......

Additionally, while it is certainly true that many urban areas across the country especially in the Rust Belt are or were in decline, i would be careful to not simply blame the "local" hoods etc.....

In fact some of the comments on this thread strike me as "almost" "racist" or simply ignorant.....

There are in fact many reasons why property values went down and why these areas decayed/declined in the 70's and 80's and even today.
Many of these reasons had little to do with the unwillingness of the "locals" to work or keep a nice, clean house. And in fact have more to do with an overall pattern of intentional neglect and disinvestment in these urban communities.
Much of which occured as a result or at least linked to the phenomenon of white and even black middle class flight.
This was in many cases pushed through, or at least ignored by federal policies especially under Reagan and Bush I. All of which resulted in communities that were incapable of "fixing" themselves.

For more information read a book, such as American Project: The rise and Fall of an Urban Ghetto, or any other book by Sudhir Venkatesh. Or any other scholar who has studied this phenomenon....

thats all fine and good namhenderson, but where they are calling for this to happen is an area that is being revitalized in a completely different way
and its working
i live in this area, and in the past 2 years, there has been a complete transformation.
When i first bought my house, i could look out my front door and see an endless number of abandoned or unlivable houses
now, it looks like a brand new area

i live on a small street, not a main road at all for development, and even here, there have been 6 out of 15 houses rehabbed within the past year
and this is the situation for most of the area
that doesnt sound like a neighborhood that needs to be completely overhauled by any means

if any of my comments sounded racist, they werent by any means. the people i refered to who dont want to work on farms, its not because they are black or white, they happen to be white trash people, who i know for a fact dont have jobs, arent trying to get jobs, and will live in their houses paying dirt cheap rent until someone kicks them out
and that is slowly happening, as people are buying houses here, rennovating them, and making the area nice again


i can see this idea working in an area that really needs it, this area does not
and no matter what advances have been made, there would need to be some serious money put into something like this happening anywhere
i dont really see it being very practical

@ Marmkid,

I wasn't trying to label anyone, however i did want to point out the extenuating circumstances for much of what occured in our urban areas during the last 2 decades or so of the 20th century.
And your certainly right that such an undertaking would require an enormous amount of investment in both time and money.....

However, especially as cities become more and more desirable and necessary from a sustainable point of view, these sorts of investments will be necessary.

My only point was that although such proposals may seem silly or unrealistic, these are exactly the type of choices/direction our society will need to take on the next decades in order to ensure that all members of society both rich/poor and white/other can live a healthy, life in vibrant urban community.

This will mean going beyond simply gentrifying the neighborhoods of the neglected urban areas and actuallly trying to develop them alon new and hopefully smarter and more equitable lines......

this may require us looking and even implementing ideas that seem unrealistic etc./.....

my point is that they should pick an area that needs help moving in the right direction

its hard to take this proposal too seriously beyond a theoretical exercise when they choose a site like this

to make a proposal such as this, they did very little research it seems in finding a suitable site

as you said, this is quite an investment, and as such, should be spent in the area that needs it the most

going beyond gentrifying a neighborhood may soon be necessary and in some places probably already is
they should go to these areas and propose something along these lines, because it could actually be pretty interesting

but when an area has picked itself up from the mess it was in and is making progress in rebuilding itself, having a proposal come along saying it should be completely redone in a completely new way will only have a negative impact
it would reverse a lot of what has already been done


on the plus side though
it would introduce a new smell to the area that could help improve some rough spots on my walk to work

Yeah, Nam I've actually lived in these area that we're referring to and for the record I'm not the whitest person on the block myself. As a matter of fact I've lived in far more blighted areas both urban and rural. I've actually faced discrimination. So I'm not even going to accept that "you're being racist and ignorant" bull crap.

I know the people I've lived around and I know the conversations we have had on a day to day basis. No, everyone wasn't in the "hood" thing but it felt like it many times based on what a small group of trouble makers put us through. And from most of the conversations we had we didn't sit around and bandy about eating shit that was organic. In reality, we would eat anything that came our way. And we certainly didn't talk about replacing our homes and neighborhoods with farms so that we could slave on them.

Again, there have been many strategies that have been working very effectively so there are is absolutely no need to go to these extreme measures. And most of these strategies start with actually caring and not imposing self-righteous hobbies on poor people.

Just so I understand - Marm, you are against the specific location that they point out, but not necessarily the concept right? I know plenty of vacant properties in Philadelphia that would be cheaper to demolish then to renovate or the cost of demolition exceeds the property value. The kind of property Philadelphia gives away for $1. So if the concept was applied to those kinds of properties, would it be able to work?

Of course the problem with that is that they're not continuous. So it would be more like community gardens and less.... farm.

this urban farming concept for philly isn't orginal. see the van alan's urban voids competition a few years back. before this, one of my classmates at Upenn proposed exactly this concept for her landscape thesis project and then was a finalist in Urban Voids.

My comments are directed not specifically at Philly...and any application there.

I was simply arguing that as a conceptual re-think of urban voids, although it is not original, the idea of re-tooling our cities is a good one.

More generally there are many areas, nationally and globally that would be well of jump-starting development/intra-urbanization with new technologies, infrastructures and conceptual approaches. Beyond those that have usually been applied, in the last century.

Urban farming may not be new but in will likely be in whatever form, whether MVRDV's pig-scraper or urban infill.

Philarch
yes, i think specifically this area isnt right for this idea.
the way they presented it, there will be entire blocks that is all open farmland, and what looks like even more than that, even some streets taken over
this isnt the right area for that at all

i love the idea of community gardens, like i said, i would love to have the empty lot behind my house and turn it into a garden
but with the development of the area right now, urban farming would be a step backward

treekiller
Front Studio seems to have presented this exact same presentation at the Urban Voids competition.
which entry was your classmate a part of?

namhenderson
I agree that it is a good idea for rethinking urban voids in cities. but it needs to be applied to the right areas and not be done just to be done
for this Front Studio to be making presentations saying this would be a better solution for the area's development, i happen to not agree with them, and think they are pushing a potentially good idea at the wrong location

plus, if the competition was in 2005, it is now almost 2008.
the area has been completely transformed in that amount of time. if they are to be going around trying to make this happen, they really should do some more homework

farming is hard work

When I first saw some of these images, I thought: "Wow! Baghdad 1987."

In essence, uninspiring and lackluster urban programming...

This is something you see pretty often in Japan. People's back yards are rice paddies, and they have a row of tomatoes by the garage.

It's more common in what they would call the "country" (would count as a city in the US), but I saw it on the edges of cities too.

Marmkid - I'll admit I haven't been to Philly in about 4-5 years, but according to Wikipedia Philadelphia has lost another 4.6% of their population from 2000 to '06. Yes, it's almost 2008 now but hundreds of thousands of people surely haven't moved back into Philadelphia in two years time. If the population decline trend continues I can easily see whole sections of the city being vacant and available for this idea.

If the old row houses truly are gentrifying, which I don't doubt you on, the simple fact is that with less population, less housing is needed. Revitilization may be working but not on the same density.

I guess this raises the question as to what urban living is. There are clearly areas of Detroit that have less population density as the suburbs. Is that more urban than the suburb because it's closer to downtown? I'm not so sure.

While I found this idea interesting, it's not my ideal. I'd rather see Bucks county go back to farmland and Philly be back to 2 million people. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening in my lifetime.

I've also seen cows in city streets. In Costa Rica, a third-world country (a pretty damn nice one, though).

my whole point is that these guys came up with this idea a couple years ago when this area looked like that and was in need of a lot of work. what has happened since then is a whole lot of development and growth and a lot of new people come into the area. despite what wikipedia says, this specific area has been growing a lot and is not on the decline.
whether that holds true for the entire city as a whole, i dont know or care, as Philadelphia has such weird city boundaries, its hard to know what is actually in the city. you cant generalize stats from a couple years ago and assume it applies to a small portion of the overall city.

the number of vacant lots and buildings is decreasing very rapidly here, which points toward this area actually getting better. more housing is being needed, which is why this is happening here, and in center city, there are multiple new condo hi rises built and under construction. that wouldnt happen if the demand for housing was declining 4.6% a year.

i was only trying to give the view of the area from someone who lives there now, as these guys clearly havent researched what is going on currently, otherwise they wouldnt be re-presenting their work as if nothing has changed.

now if they gave this presentation as a theory, and not site-specific, that is fine. i think its an interesting idea in general, but you really need to find the right place for it. this isnt in my opinion

@ Aquapura,

You make an interesting point,
If an urban area is less dense i would argue that it isn't urban anymore. Or at least not just becaus eit falls within the city limits...

Suburbs ad ex-urbs are in many cases becoming more dense as they age, especially the ones that have been around awhile. Have you seen some of the new faux-urban town centeres they have begun building in older suburban areas??

I to would rather see the older cities be re-densified. However, even with the new interest in post-empty nest boomers moving into the city, i don't see how that is going to happen in a major way.

And relatedly, if we are going to continue to loose farmland outside of our cities, to sub/ex-urban sprawl, why not re-purpose our urban areas to provide the open space, ecological diversity and farmland etc that are dissapearing? However, it does raise the question would it really be "urban" farming? As you pointed out it would by defintion be taking place in de-urbanized locales......

i suppose it depended on how less dense it would be. it seems from the images from Front Studio, it wouldnt be urban anymore. But it seems like you could get a block here and there, spread out among the city. that could be interesting, a city block set aside for farmland, and have it surrounded by city growth on all around it. the boundary would be those particular stretches of street

i guess another question for this is where do you keep all of the processing, and farming equipment. tractors coming down the street seem like they could cause a bit of a traffic jam

marmkid - points taken. I wasn't trying to attack your neighborhood. Per what you say I would agree it isn't ideal for this type of project for your area of Philly. Mostly I was just using Philly as an example because Front Studio did. Obviously the city has shrunk substantially, but I think we all can agree the best solution is to redensify the urban core.

namhenderson - i myself live in an older suburb that has seen much of the new development faux-urban town center. Architecturally I have some criticism, but overall I think it greatly improves the old fabric of the area. It goes back to the multi-use apartments above shops which I applaud. Attention has been made towards the pedestrian and hopefully light rail/mass transit will make an appearance sometime. Now if some of the blighted urban areas between that suburban node and the downtown core were returned to farmland where I could get locally produced food I would applaud that. Guess that's what I like about the Front Studio idea.

@ Aquapura your the last point in your comment is what i was advocating at least conceptually. However, sure one would have to avoid being some sort of architectural colonizer.....


Urban void as useful infrastructure. That simply is what i think needs to be addressed and examined more seriously in this country and others.

I think this would be more powerful in an urban environment that is experiencing tremendous development... preserving a portion of this land for an alternative use, like farming, is very interesting.

-to

i wonder how you would go about developing this idea and putting it into effect in reality. unless you have a government agency saying you should preserve X% of the land for this, you probably need one developer to get the ball rolling and to have the resources to develop smaller lots for farm development. it seems that the payoff would take a little time, so you would need to have to be able to wait for your investment to pay off, probably longer than if you just built a house on a lot and sold it or rented it.

a different kind of developer would need to come into the area than has traditionally worked in city areas like this.

i saw some people post that there have been places where this has been done. are any of them in the US?

to-

Powerful in what way? The point of the farmadelphia concept is to use vacant, abandoned properties meaning areas with shrinking populations.

Marm-

I don't think it will have anything to do with a developer since it won't deal with profitability. This is talking about economic/social sustainability among other things. Developers want max profitability in the shortest amount of time with least risk. I would imagine a more grass roots approach, but thats being naive too. Compelling images sell the concept, but we need a compelling implementation plan to make it happen.

it's happening in detroit, but you have the same sort of land acquisition problems as you have with any large scale development, namely multiple owners, each with his or her own idea of what the land is worth. the city will use imminent domain in some cases, but that has gotten more difficult in the state of michigan after a ballot proposal last year challenging imminent domain.

the main problem i see with this type of development is that the people usually behind it are not money people. they do not understand development and generally float proposals that are not economically feasible. the instances where it has been successful are where people have basically squatted the land. most owners are not present until money is on the table. if you just take the land your chances of success are much higher, but this precludes large scale agricultural development where i believe things get more interesting in terms of a larger planning strategy.

haha imagine you own a lot of land that you havent been to in a while and show up one day and it is a cornfield

When growing up we had some neighbors that used the vacant lot next to them for a garden. Had all kinds of squash growing there. Then one day the developer who owned it came out with a big brush cutter and mowed off the whole site, veggies and all. Total waste as they didn't build on the site for several years after.