CitySeed: Design Brigade Week 1
The Problem
Farmers’ markets are a great way for urban communities to access fresh local produce and stimulate the local farming economy. For the past seventeen years in New Haven, CitySeed has actively sought to create a more inclusive and equitable local food system while promoting economic development and sustainable agriculture through its farmers’ markets and other programs. However, CitySeed’s ambitions encounter an issue faced by markets across the country: they are often perceived as places for white people of higher socioeconomic standing as a result of generations of systemic inequality. This is often reflected in latent qualities of markets related to placement, structure, pricing, and general diversity. As a result, these spaces have difficulty engaging the communities most negatively affected by the current food system.
So what does a more equitable and inclusive farmers’ market look like? How can the markets serve more BIPOC farmers and vendors? What are the physical ramifications of making changes to our existing market guidelines? How are accessibility and inclusive design also considered? These are the questions our Design Brigade team set out to answer this summer to help CitySeed address their goals. Our project aims to be transparent to provide a roadmap for other organizations with similar goals, so we will provide weekly updates on the project here on Medium.
Team
- Huy Truong — March ’23 — Yale School of Architecture — Project Manager
- Claire Hicks — March ’22 — Yale School of Architecture
- Joseph Reich — March ’23 — Yale School of Architecture
- Sebastian Bruno — BS, Mech. Eng. ’22 — Yale College
- Serge Saab — MArch II ’22 — Yale School of Architecture
- Veronica Chen — BA, Art, and Mech. Eng. ’21 — Yale College
- Yang Tian — March ’22 — Yale School of Architecture
Goals & Methods
At the end of the internship, our goal is to provide CitySeed with a toolkit that describes a plan to help them reach their goals. Since our hope for the toolkit is implementation, it will include detailed steps specifically for CitySeed. But since we will also want our toolkit to be of use to other organizations, it will also have general suggestions that they can implement. Ultimately, this toolkit will be a set of strategies to help address the issues faced by CitySeed, but embedded within it will be information that reframes major issues in terms specific to CitySeed and New Haven. To ensure this project’s success, we will abide by the values set outlined in the Design Brigade ’21 brief.
First Steps
This week, we organized as a team and developed our initial research in the areas of Stakeholders, Produce, Places, Rituals, Precedents, Justice, and Team Values. Additionally, we had our initial meeting with CitySeed and started the first of many conversations to see what direction they wanted the project to focus on and hear some of their previous attempts to address those problems. Some initials takeaway from the meeting were:
- The SNAP matching program is their primary tool of attracting low-income consumers
- They struggle with getting BIPOC vendors due to the lack of BIPOC farmers in Connecticut
- Many of their markets and other programs were stopped or scaled back due to COVID 19
- In their initial efforts to increase diversity at the markets, the focus was on the SNAP customers because some of the changes needed regarding vendors were not practical for them as an organization
We are using those takeaways to focus our research, examine obstacles CitySeed encountered, explore new opportunities, and see how and if we can overcome some of the shortcomings. We also visited one of the markets, talked to the organizers, and interacted with some vendors. Our goal was to try to see the market from the perspectives of both organizers and the market-goers and pinpoint some areas of concern.
Next Steps
In the coming week, we plan to discuss and evaluate our observations and opinions from the site visit. This will help us develop our research within the defined focus areas and direct it towards topics that we think are most relevant to the goals of the project. Additionally, we have several meetings planned with organizations in New Haven that have collaborated with or doing similar work as CitySeed. We also hope to set up interviews with community members and farmers to get their opinions on the current state of the market ecosystem.
Additional Readings and Precedents
- Black Farmers Markets work to Redesign the Food System, The Counter
- Food Justice, FoodPrint
- New Haven Food Action Plan
- Who We Are, CitySeed
