Digging where we stand: Visions of ‘urbundance’ and the role of food production in Christchurch
By Bailey Peryman, Oliver Peryman and Michelle Marquet
First published in Once in a Lifetime: City-building after Disaster in Christchurch. Freerange Press. 2014. [here for details and purchase]
The authors make up the team that owns, directs and manages Garden City 2.0, a company designed to grow resilience in our local food system by working with Christchurch communities. Their expertise involves community development, permacultural design and development, and qualitative research at post-graduate level on topics including Environmental Management, Social Sustainability and Education. Each enjoys the pursuit of health in all spheres of being.
Amidst the chaos and the sadness during the immediate aftermath of the earthquakes, we observed our communities ‘digging where they stood’ in an upsurge of solidarity and togetherness. In these times, we realised some of our most simple needs for living: food, water, shelter and community. The Share an Idea process gave rise to strong themes of sustainability and green living — a ‘city in a garden’. This included specific projects like community gardens and neighbourhood-scale initiatives to continue fostering the collective benefits that cooperation between individuals and groups produced. The Council’s Draft Central City Plan appeared to respond to this new found role for ‘social capital’, yet so far the recovery process has failed to link its value with the potential for generating environmental benefits. So much has been said for the rise in socially innovative projects in Christchurch, yet so few of these or the plans being prepared for the city are addressing the biggest social issues of our time, which are profoundly environmental crises. Flooding, poor water quality in our rivers, soil contamination and housing built on vulnerable land — these examples demonstrate how little the collective action being taken is doing to improve the (dis)harmony we have with the landscape that supports us.
At Garden City 2.0 we are continuing to dig where we stand in order to build on our hopes for urban living in a healthy habitat: a place that is nourishing to live, work and play in. In order to create this environment, we focus on growing resilience in our local food system through building community around the production and distribution of high quality foods that are seasonal, organic and locally grown. Improving resilience is an important response to the shortcomings in our current food system, the insecurities of which were highlighted post-quake. Sometimes, we refer to a vision of ‘urbundance’ — an abundant and resilient urban fabric that promotes a lively, healthy habitat. These visions for regenerating health are also being articulated by a wide range of people and organisations, and it is this variety that we feel is a precursor to the richness that characterises a healthy habitat. There is a growing body of academic research that considers these expressions in terms of ‘urban ecology’ and resilience in socio-ecological systems.[1]
Habitat wellbeing: The connections between food, land and us
We feel the planning processes that are defining and have already defined so much of our ‘recovery’ are failing to dig deep enough to genuinely reveal the true strengths of our local environment, and therefore encourage a healthy urban ecology. In his influential book One Straw Revolution Masanobu Fukuoka says ‘Sickness comes when people draw apart from nature. The severity of the disease is directly proportional to the degree of separation.’[2] The environment is, after all, our basis for habitation, the source of so much ongoing disruption in our lives now in Christchurch, and that which ultimately impacts on our health and wellbeing.
One way of reducing the degree of separation is by promoting the immediately tangible relationship we could have with our habitat through food. The quality of this relationship depends on the integrity of our ecosystems and the services they gift to us: water, soil and sources of energy. Environmental quality and resilient socio-ecological systems are therefore related to the wellbeing of people, directly through our sources of food (and water).
At the moment, however, this separation from our habitat is highlighted through the loss of significant connection to the foods we eat — something that has occurred in the space of little more than one or two generations. In particular, we have become distant from the knowledge of how we grow and eat certain foods that our ancestors knew were health-giving on many levels. In our increasingly urban lives, backyard gardens and small-scale family agriculture have mostly been replaced by imported foods trucked into our supermarkets from unknown origins. Our health statistics are revealing the ill effects of our modern industrialised food system[3] that also contributes significantly to compounding environmental crises around the world.[4]
This disconnection with the land, and subsequently with our food production, goes back to the founding of Christchurch. The garden city concept was born out of concern for people’s living conditions during the industrial revolution, particularly in urban quarters. As a blueprint for urban development, this concept was re-appropriated for Christchurch — a grid pattern of city streets was imposed upon, and in stark contrast to, the natural flow of the landscape. This approach failed to incorporate the environment containing the food baskets (mahinga kai) for Ōtautahi, Puari and Ōtākaro,[5] which have long since been lost to urbanisation.
The Central City Recovery Plan and Land Use Recovery Plan are merely reinforcing this same incongruence. The natural characteristics of the landscape have been suppressed and modified to suit the extraction and consumption of goods and displacement of our waste. Sprawling, car-centric subdivisions built on prime productive soils (e.g. Prestons-Marshlands, Wigram-Halswell) are clear examples of this. Current recovery planning fails to support the types of participation and ongoing relationships we see as necessary for in-depth dicussion about the health of our people and the urban ecology of Christchurch.
Opportunities for re-establishing food resilience
The fragility of our food system was highligted after the earthquakes. Our reliance on broken roads, closed or distant supermarkets that stock processed foods, the levels of pollution in our rivers, heavily contaminated soils and the obesity epidemic[6] — all of these things point to systemic failure of our urban ecology. Ultimately, we live in a food insecure region where we cannot see the fields that sustain us.[7]
Yet the earthquakes also brought with them the opportunity to change and cultivate food resilience. In the aftermath of February 2011, people were content to work with each other to help make our places liveable, at least temporarily. We saw immense bonds between people and place where previously there had been considerable distance. With encouraging and enabling recovery structures, people might have begun to sow large gardens with the use of tools and seeds from community gardens, knowing that supermarkets would be closed in certain areas for some years to come. From this a culture of transition towards urban ecological resilience could emerge.
Garden City 2.0 responded to this opportunity and now works to encourage this resilience through community food production. It also seeks to uncover and promote the knowledge involved in this work. Its primary operation is a commercial organic food distribution service and retail outlet, sourcing seasonal fruit and vegetables from local growers. The company works alongside Soil and Health Canterbury to strengthen the community food sector through various collaborative arrangements, such as the Agropolis Urban Farm initiative. This emerging sector spans household, school and community garden education and small-scale local food production, and is connected to the wider organic agricultural sector. Garden City 2.0 also participates in the emerging ‘Food Resilience Network’ that is organising itself around urbundance visions for Greater Christchurch.
Creating community through digging where we stand
In our view, foods and their associated environments can be great platforms for developing respectful relationships and therefore promoting the health of the socio-ecological system. Using our local food distribution service as an example, we seek growers working ‘organically’ with their farmland (fig. 1). When working with these growers we make decisions through relationships that favour cooperation instead of competition; we allow the growers to set fair prices and in return we gather invaluable knowledge and experience of how food is grown and distributed sustainably in Christchurch. These are urbundance visions coming to life; the physical changes to our habitat and the failures of the food system have created space and opportunities to begin realising an urban ecology that supports local communities to work collectively to meet their health needs.
This philosophy of local food, organics and transitional cities is something that was active in Christchurch long before the earthquakes, just as the Blueprint is a collection of pre-existing ideas.[8] The concept of ‘recovery’ is somewhat of a misnomer in that it seems to miss the point. None of the anchor projects prioritises improving the quality of relationships between people and their habitat, not least through connections made using food. For example, the Avon-Ōtākaro River Precinct might state these aims through an emphasis on mahinga kai values, but the poor quality of its surrounding environment and ongoing storm- and waste-water overflows mean we are still far from regenerating the kind of abundance it is revered for historically.
While opportunities for dialogue have been present, many decisions are still being made outside of the general reach of the public. For example, Agropolis Urban Farm is a project designed to provide people a chance to participate in regenerating the inner-city environment through urban farming. It is technically illegal as it is yet to be signed off by the Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery as a legitimate use of land designated for the Innovation Precinct. As a result, the people working voluntarily to restore community in the inner-city, by developing a community garden, are shrouded in uncertainty and illegitimacy.
The visions we experience in working to regenerate healthy water, healthy soil, healthy food and healthy people in Christchurch are taking Garden City 2.0 deeper into conversations about how we relate to the natural world. We call this approach ‘digging where we stand’.[9] Creating an environment that is free from domination requires a different seed of thought and a system of people-interactions that is genuinely liberating. As an organisation that values biological diversity and deep historical observations of place, we expect also for there to be a diversity and plurality of planning voices supported by similar principles. Start imagining a city restored to health: this is a seed for urbundance in the garden city of the twenty-first century.
Footnotes:
[1] Carl Folke, “Resilience: The emergence of a perspective for social-ecological systems,” Global Environmental Change 16 (2006): 253–267.
[2] Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming (Emmaus:Rodale Press, 1978).
[3] Canterbury District Health Board, Community and Public Health, “Christchurch City Health Profile: Obesity,” last modified March, 2013, http://www.healthychristchurch.org.nz/media/11938/obesity.pdf.
[4] Ben Lilliston, “New UN Report Calls for Transformation in Agriculture,” Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, September 20, 2014, http://www.iatp.org/blog/201309/new-un-report-calls-for-transformation-in-agriculture.
[5] Te Marie Tau, The Values and History of the Ōtākaro and North and East Frames (Ngāi Tahu Research Centre, 2014).
[6] Canterbury District Health Board, “Christchurch City Health Profile: Obesity.”
[7] Food security is often defined in terms of access and affordability, and primarily reported on as a health and social justice issue. Localising food systems and empowering organic community food initiatives are common solutions applied globally. The affordability of fresh food is improved by shortening the supply chain by connecting growers direct with consumers, and more accessible due to its proximity — especially true of home gardens and urban farms. Nutritional value is greater through the food being unprocessed, fresh and organic.
[8] John McCrone, “Christchurch Rebuild: A City Stalled,” The Press, March 8, 2014, http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/business/the-rebuild/9805314/Christchurch-rebuild-A-city-stalled.
[9] Alistair McIntosh, Soil and Soul: People Versus Corporate Power (London: Aurum Press, 2001).
