“Tackling the challenges of food security, economic development and energy security in a context of ongoing population growth will require a renewed and re-imagined focus on agricultural development. Agriculture can and should become the backbone of tomorrow’s green economy.”

According to Mueller, agriculture lies at the centre of the “water-energy-food” nexus. “When you start looking at the issue of how we are going to provide food, water, light, heat and other services and products for 9 billion people, it becomes quite clear that agriculture is perhaps the linchpin of everything,” he said. “If we have the political will and farsightedness, we can make agriculture the engine of tomorrow’s green economy. Climate-smart farming systems that make efficient use of resources like water, land, and energy must become the basis of tomorrow’s agricultural economy.”

- FAO Assistant Director-General for Natural Resources, Alexander Mueller

http://www.fao.org

A year ago I thought landscape architects were really poised to take on a leading position in large multidisciplinary projects, but now I am not so sure. We definitely have to think and act differently than five or even one year ago. But how? Towards what?

A big source of inspiration in my research toward sustainability within landscape architecture, and thinking about the future in general,  is the work and musings of John Thackara, author of ‘In the Bubble.’ I met John when I was working on the the FOODPRINT series of events in 2009 at STROOM in the Hague. John travels the world speaking, and he is able to keep his finger on the pulse of many things.

As I was reading his blog, Doors of Perception, I came across the following four points he lists as essential to a new kind of design. This quote is taken from a talk given at the UNBOX lecture in Dehli earlier this year entitled “Life’s Work: Opportunities in the Restorative Economy.”

This new kind of design…

- is based on the new core value of a restorative economy;
– engages with the next economy, not the dying one we have now;
– focuses on service and social innovation, not on the outputs of extractive industries;
– is unique to its place – and therefore infijnitely diverse – but is also globally networked.

The idea of restorative or regenerative design is incredibly relevant right now, as we not only have the physical environment to restore in so many different ways, but must do so while creating new economic and spatial possibilities.

THE ETERNAL CITY?

Due to faster than expected sea level rise, scientists project that even the drastic intervention of the M.O.S.E. sea barrier project will only delay the permanent flooding of Venice by 100 to 200 years. In this future vision of drastically altered climate conditions, coastal cities such as Venice will have to physically and economically reinvent themselves in order to survive.

After the M.O.S.E. sea gates stop functioning, Venice will once again face imminent danger. Concurrently, sewage pollution will increase exponentially because the sea barrier will increasingly close the lagoon which will no longer be renewed by the tides. Venice has never maintained a main sewage system- for this reason, a large portion of the wastes generated in the historic center of Venice have always been discharge directly into its channels. Water quality, particularly near the city, is extremely poor.

Although Venice has a thriving tourism based economy, the city is becoming mummified, a static image of itself. The future of the industrial areas inland with their dying petrochemical industry grows ever weaker, while Venice itself is continually losing inhabitants. The future is a complex dynamic of environmental pressures and economic imperatives.

AN EMERALD BELT: LONGTERM PROTECTION FROM CLIMATE CHANGE

The Serenissima plan proposes to augment the existing underwater topography of the lagoon with a readily available and sustainable material: sand from the floor of the Adriatic. The sand is gathered by large boats called Trailing Suction Hopper Dredgers. The sand is projected into the lagoon shallows, progressively forming a dune barrier with an inner zone of sand flats and tidal marshes. This process is similar to the coastal reinforcement and climate proofing strategies of Northern Europe, for example in The Netherlands.

A system of locks connects the dune sections, allowing ships into the city. Opening the locks allows fresh sea water into the heart of the city, flushing water outwards into the tidal marshlands on the edges of the dune zones. The large surface area of these wetlands, which contain a gradient of salt to brackish water, is sufficient to cleanse the water. Organic waste is turned into plant biomass, which also functions as a large-scale carbon sink, thus working against climate change.  Wetlands are considered the most biologically diverse of all ecosystems; they are biological engines that can be adapted to waste water treatment as well as agricultural purposes. They are vital to the large populations of migrating birds that visit the lagoon. This will in effect create an enormous nature reserve around the city and preserve the specificity of the lagoon environement.

The widest dune section functions as a water purification plant. Water is pumped through the dunes, the sand acts as a filter. Lightly brackish water can further be purified to provide fresh water and stored in reservoirs. Recreational paths, camping sites, wildlife zones, Mediterranean maquis shrubland and dune vegetation ecotopes are some of the essential elements that inform the program of the dune barrier.

This designed land will function as a hybrid territory of landscape identities and new urban growth. Residential and business zones set into the emerald necklace will create a thriving future city, with the jewel of old Venice at its heart. The edge of the city will extend to the dunes and beaches facing the New Adriatic. Finally impervious to the elements and transformed into a new island nation, Venice will once more be married to the sea.

Jacques Abelman, Txell Blanco Diaz, Simona Serafino, Egle Suminskaite, and Marit Janse collaborated to present Red Point Parks, a vision for future development around New York’s Upper Bay, in a future where the sea has risen over 3 meters.

From the project despcription:

Climate change demands a radical adaptation strategy around the Upper Bay. Our point of departure is water quality. Currently, combined sewage outflows contaminate the bay, and the water level may rise from three to five meters in the future, creating further ecological and infrastructural challenges. Our proposal is the Red Point Park public pier system.

Red Point Parks are a network of access points around the altered urban edge of the renamed Central Bay. Wetlands now occupy the flood zones, creating a living storm buffer.  Some buildings have been preserved by stripping their first floors and strengthening the foundations. New piers extend from the access points through eelgrass and fish nursery zones, into deeper waters where oyster reefs have been re-established. Five new transport hubs create a water highway around the bay, giving way to a quieter zone in the center.    The restored estuary ecology supports a variety of programs, from scuba diving and windsurfing to new museums and restaurants. In addition there are small artificial beaches at Governor’s Island and the shallows facing Brooklyn. The greenline network connects inner urban areas to the bay and absorbs rain water, diverting it from the sewage system. It is easy to bike or walk along these channels to reach the water’s edge. Channels widen at the end to allow the tides to enter the system.

The aquapuncture of the Red Point Parks responds to climate change to transform the city, creating a new urban edge and a living estuary whose heart is pristine water. In this sense, the entire bay functions as a park.

August 10^th, 2100: a summer story

“Do you remember the summer of 2075, when the hurricanes hit? Do you remember how it was before the water got so high?” I asked my friend. We were sitting together on the stoop of our Brooklyn brownstone, it was a sweltering day, 105° F.

“I remember how the sewage used to flow into the water every time it rained. It was a mess when they still called it the Upper Bay. That was a long time ago, and the water is about three meters higher now, and that old waterfront is now the Red Point Parks. Let’s follow the greenlines down there and swim, I can’t take this heat!” she said.

We jumped on our bikes and followed the shallow canal of grasses and trees through Park Slope and down to Red Point Park 33. The old sewage overflow was gone – now at the end of the greenline you could see clean water burbling from the outflow, right before the pier started. Extending through a wetland, the vast new pier stretched out into the bay, alongside old foundations and ancient raised warehouses missing their first floors.

We stripped down to our bathing suits and jumped off the side of the pier where the marshy vegetation gave way to deeper water filled with eelgrass. They say it’s almost clean enough to drink now, and the sturgeons are back.

“Thank god for this luxury that we have at our doorstep. The wetlands even protect us from the hurricanes. Storm buffers you can relax in!” She sighed, floating on her back in the cool water.

“Do you want to go to Governor’s Island Beach this weekend? We can rent an electric boat at the Brooklyn Water Hub. I want to check out diving lessons. Let’s pick our own oysters from the reefs for dinner!” I said, splashing.

We were both enjoying the park, and happy in a city that knew how to adapt to the adversity it faced in the past. Our New York, our Central Bay.

One of the remarkable characteristics of The Netherlands, especially from the foreigner’s point of view, is the amount of carefully protected open green space surrounding densely populated urban centers. The Dutch are extremely keen on verdant fields with placidly grazing cows and sheep always being within a bike ride away from the city, and this is true in most cases. However, as space becomes an ever more precious commodity, the preserved status of these green zones is being called into question. In many cases these peri-urban areas are carefully managed by several partners in order to preserve their rural appearance, yet they no longer function as viable agricultural spaces for a variety reasons. In some areas soil has been too contaminated by dioxins, pcb’s, and other pollutants to allow food production. In other areas it is no longer economically viable. An enormous amount of energy and coordination is necessary for the maintenance of these spaces which appear to be agricultural but are in fact a kind of park landscape reminding inhabitants of their farming origins. As urban populations increase and diversify what future role will these once vital farmlands play?

The Krabbeplas initiative set out to investigate if these green zones could be “put back to work.” The task of the designers was to investigate meaningful re-purposing of place. The EELLs project point of departure was the desire to immerse visitors in the sensory pleasures nature has to offer by creating new outdoor leisure space, a lounge-in-a-field that creates opportunities to be in touch with sights, sounds, and smells of nature at close range as well as offering a window onto ecological cycles. The project was driven by the use of agricultural processes to create a flexible form of ecological architecture. Hay and straw from the site were stuffed into biodegradable plastic tubing and then arranged into different configurations to create temporay shelters and organic lounging spaces.

Perfect for events in the fields, the EELLs have another purpose. Once their use as outdoor furniture is complete, they can be left on site to begin another process. The straw filled tubes are soaked in water and innoculated with mushroom spores. Over the course of several weeks, the mushroom spores spread throught the straw while the bioplastics break down, bringing the growing fungi into contact with the earth. The fungi are then able to colonize the soil of the site. Studies have shown that the enzymes present in fungal mycelial networks break down complex molecules such as dioxin and pcb, metabolizing them into harmless substances. This form of bioremediation is called mycoremediation. The mycelial net, which can grow to the size of an entire forest in some species, does the work of purifying the polluted ground. The fruiting bodies it then creates that we call mushrooms remain safe to eat.

The EELLs project attempts to address new ways to enjoy agricultural green space, actively connecting users to ecological cycles and introducing the concept of bioremediation. From hay harvest to lounging and through to mushroom production and soil purification, pleasure and utility are combined in a new leisure landscape.

from the website of  BRACKET:

ISSUE #1: ON FARMING

Once merely understood in terms of agriculture, today information,energy, labour, and landscape, among others, can be farmed. Farming harnesses the efficiency of collectivity and community. Whether cultivating land, harvesting resources, extracting energy or delegating labor, farming reveals the interdependencies of our globalized world. Simultaneously, farming represents the local gesture, the productive landscape, and the alternative economy. The processes of farming a remutable, parametric, and efficient. From terraforming to foodsheds to crowdsourcing, farming often involves the management of the natural mediated by the technologic. Farming, beyond its most common agricultural understanding is the modification of infrastructure,urbanisms, architectures, and landscapes toward a privileging of production.

Check out the book, now available from ACTAR.

BRUSSELS (22 June 2010) – “Governments and international agencies urgently need to boost ecological farming techniques to increase food production and save the climate,” said UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, while presenting the findings at an international meeting on agroecology held in Brussels on 21 and 22 June.

Along with 25 of the world’s most renowned experts on agroecology, the UN expert urged the international community to re-think current agricultural policies and build on the potential of agroecology.

“One year ago, Heads of States at the G20 gathering in Italy committed to mobilizing $22 billion over a period of three years to improve global food security. This was welcome news, but the most pressing issue regarding reinvestment in agriculture is not how much, but how,” Olivier De Schutter said .

“Today, most efforts are made towards large-scale investments in land – including many instances of land grabbing – and towards a ‘Green Revolution’ model to boost food production: improved seeds, chemical fertilisers and machines,” the Special Rapporteur remarked. “But scant attention has been paid to agroecological methods that have been shown to improve food production and farmers’ incomes, while at the same time protecting the soil, water, and climate.”

The widest study ever conducted on agroecological approaches (Jules Pretty, Essex University, UK) covered 286 projects in 57 developing countries, representing a total surface of 37 million hectares: the average crop yield gain was 79%. Concrete examples of ‘agroecological success stories’ abound in Africa.

In Tanzania, the Western provinces of Shinyanga and Tabora used to be known as the ‘Desert of Tanzania’. However, the use of agroforestry techniques and participatory processes allowed some 350,000 hectares of land to be rehabilitated in two decades. Profits per household rose by as much as USD 500 a year. Similar techniques are used in Malawi, where some 100,000 smallholders in 2005 benefited to some degree from the use of fertilizer trees.
“With more than a billion hungry people on the planet, and the climate disruptions ahead of us, we must rapidly scale up these sustainable techniques,” De Schutter said. “Even if it makes the task more complex, we have to find a way of addressing global hunger, climate change, and the depletion of natural resources, all at the same time. Anything short of this would be an exercise in futility.”
The experts gathering in Brussels identified the policies that could develop agroecological approaches to the scale needed to feed the world in 2050. They based their work on the experiences of countries that have pro-agroecology policies – such as Cuba or Brazil – as well as on the successful experiences from international research centres such as the World Agroforestry Center in Nairobi, and on the programmes of La Via Campesina, the transnational peasant movement, which runs agroecology training programmes.
“We can scale up these sustainable models of agriculture, and ensure that they work for the benefit of the poorest farmers. What is needed now is political will to move from successful pilot projects to nation-wide policies,” the UN Special Rapporteur said. In conclusion, he announced that he would ask the Committee on World Food Security – what should become in time the ‘Security Council’ for food security – to work during its October session on the policy levers to scale up agroecology. “This is the best option we have today. We can’t afford not to use it.”