URBAN AGRICULTURE IN AUCKLAND

Betsy Kettle

"Urban Agriculture" sounds like either an oxymoron or an impossibility. But here in the Auckland region there are three projects that combine recycling, large areas of land, community groups, Councils, and indirectly, organic growing. These types of projects may be worth emulating in other parts of New Zealand for their ability to educate the public towards issues of sustainability, reduce tonnage going to landfill and encourage more sustainable resource management. They also challenge our traditional visions of Council-owned park and reserve land.

Why Urban Agriculture?

Civic responsibility for setting aside open space was started in the 1800’s as a response to overcrowded and polluted cities in newly industrialized Europe and the Americas. This tradition continues in New Zealand today with Reserves Act of 1957. Basically it requires that for every type of urban development a percentage of land or revenue is set aside to acquire or maintain park and reserve land for the public good.

But while the original intention of providing open space for the public health and well being is the same now as it was in the 1840’s, have our social needs of how we use that open space changed? I would argue that they have. The urban parks landscape of the 1800’s is still being repeated today—the pastoral tradition of sweeping lawns with scattered ornamental shade trees is our dominant urban park landscape followed by rugby, soccer and cricket fields. Is there a higher and better purpose we could be using our urban open space for?

Meanwhile, there are community groups who envision using urban land for more functional purposes—environmental education centres, organic market gardening and self-perpetuating food forests. Should the desires of a few local neighborhood’s activists collective vision outweigh the disinterested but larger community visions? Is growing food a higher purpose than lawns and ornamental trees? Do we need to grow food in the cities?

Lets look at the three examples in the Auckland region:

Basque Park

When Pax Christi (Justice and Peace Group) at Saint Benedict’s Church took over the derelict site in Eden Terrace in 1993 they planned to turn it into allotment gardens for the needy in the neighbourhood. They formed an incorporated society called the St Benedict’s Urban Farm and requested a lease from Auckland City Council. The Council granted them a lease for a six week period with plans to sell the land to a property developer soon after. The Urban Farm group managed to delay the sale of the land and over a 4 years period the site was cleaned up, sheet mulched and became a working garden allotment. New directions came in 1997 when Basque Gardens became home to the Central Auckland Permaculture Bioregion. This time the effort was to stop the sale of the land to developers and have the land re-designated as park land. The Council agreed to this provided a management plan was developed, satisfying the needs of the entire community, not just the Urban Farm/Permaculture Group.. Several distinct factions appeared, one group desiring the park be designed and maintained in a more classical lawn/ornamental treescape so as not revert to its former disarray. The other desiring it include food forests, nut trees, fruit orchards and veggie gardens so that they could expand their environmental work without it being destroyed.

To resolve differences, Auckland City Council has hired both community mediators and a team of independent landscape architects to develop a design that will satisfy the various parties involved. The design team has come up with preliminary plans with the edible landscape out of sight from the main road. Further challenges are expected as the Urban Farmers request more visibility of their "feed the people" mission and inspire more urbanites to take up growing their own food.

The Beachlands/Maraetai ReSource Depot

When the ReSource Trust went looking for a site to establish Manukau’s first Waste Minimisation and Permaculture Education Centre only the rural ward of Clevedon responded favorably to their ideas. The concept of composting food scraps, feeding worms, teaching organic/permaculture gardening and dropping off recyclables in the middle of their residential neighborhood seemed a great idea to this semi-rural community.

Manukau City Council responded with providing an old Works Depot and funding through the Community Waste Initiative Fund. The ReSource Depot opened in June 1999 and since then community participation in the drop off recycling scheme has increased to about 25% of the Beachlands/Maraetai community and there are two full time employees. The community has taken it upon themselves to adopt a Zero Waste ideal of diverting up to 85% of their residential waste from landfill by using the Depot to take their glass, plastics, metals, paper, food scraps and grass clippings. Food scraps are hot composted and fed to worms, grass is sheetmulched and turned into gardens. The business plan indicates that with 400 homes participating in the organics programme the Depot should provide enough income from the sale of worm products to support 3 full time people. This is expected to take 2-3 years.

Yet the vision of the ReSource Trustees is more than recycling. They see the Depot becoming an environmental education centre. "We are losing our gardeners. We really want to grow more gardeners", says Trustee David Kettle. "Gardeners, especially organic gardeners, are environmentalists. There is so much to learn from how nature operates in a garden." The Trustees and Manukau City Council share the hope to bring in school children from throughout the ARC region to learn how to hot compost, worm farm, make simple school gardens and grow their own food. The ReSource Trust also organises teaching the Waste Wise Programme in north Manukau schools in which children learn to separate out their lunch scraps and feed them to their school worm bins. Major funding for this project has come from Manukau City Council’s Community Waste Initiative Fund—the only one of its kind in New Zealand.

Other Manukau wards argue that the ReSource Depot model will not fit in their communities because people want kerbside recycling. Yet unless kerbside recycling also takes into account grass, prunings and food scraps only a small percentage of discards are collected at a high cost. But if organic agriculture was promoted in New Zealand using composted urban foodscraps and grass clippings the cost of such collections might be offset savings in landfill space and avoided new landfill development.

If other councils were to take up similar funding initiatives other communities might be able to set up educational/waste diversion gardens, too. "Its really an ideal relationship," says Beachlands resident and Trustee Ray Shopland. "Everybody wins. The Council gets their message out about waste minimisation through home composting and worm farming. If the message comes from the Council no one listens, but when it comes from your own neighbors, then you see change. And the community wins because we have local jobs, a local community focus and a source of pride that they are doing something very good and very tangible that benefits ourselves and the environment."

The Hango Trust

The Manukau wards of Otara, Mangere and Manurewa are becoming infamous for their health problems. Yet the some of the churches there are taking their people’s health into their own hands. One Pacific Island church community is working with Manukau City Council to find and develop publicly owned land for market gardening—organic gardens to feed both their parishes and local food banks. This group recognizes the strong link between diet and health, but many families find they must buy the least expensive food they can find to balance the weekly budget. And while growing home gardens is a great idea, they feel they can grow more food more efficiently using larger spaces and provide work and training for unemployed youth if they farm collectively. The Hango Trust proposes to collect food scraps from their church families bring them to their site, compost them, worm farm them and use them for growing food, herbs and flowers for their church and people. The problem though, is finding local land.

The Hango Trust, like the ReSource Trust is a not-for-profit charitable trust that has applied and received funding through the MCC’s Community Waste Initiative Fund. Available land has been found, but it is reserve land. Can it be used for market gardening, composting and worm farming? The site sits on (or next to—this is in dispute) Hampton Park. This recently acquired park has historical significance both as Maori heritage land and as an early European settlement farm. The proposed park management plan suggests market gardening as an appropriate use but will it also allow for composting and worm farming which are neither historically Maori or European farming methods? Does the need to preserve the past outweigh the needs of the people in the present? This project is in process with the outcomes to be known by August 2000.

A New Vision Needed?

I believe that a sustainable city is one that is capable of growing its own food. A sustainable city uses its organic discards to go back onto the ground to grow more food and paper for the city. I believe that even though we don’t have to grow our own food yet, the Reserves Act should contain provisions to allow us to use urban land for growing food should the need arise. I believe that some urban parks should become active education centres promoting gardening and illustrating the concepts of sustainability. I believe that local parks should be ‘owned’ by the community who uses them, not the greater public at large. I believe that urban parks should have functional purposes rather than just aesthetic purposes. I believe those who live closest to public open space and who can demonstrate that the use they envision satisfies a community need should have a greater say about its ultimate design than the disinterested public at large.

Councils can help by making funding and land available to community groups who wish to tackle community-based environmental projects. Manukau’s Community Waste Initiative Fund is a good example of this. Groups must be charitable trusts or incorporated societies whose main focus is environmental benefit.

Rethinking our use of public open spaces would open a path for neighborhoods "owning" their parks and becoming centres of community focus. Right now they tend to be more Council-owned than neighborhood-owned. Should we allow for food forests, garden allotments, and market gardens to happen along side playing fields and places to walk the dog? I believe we should. Parks could become community-owned recycling centres, market gardens, stormwater aquaculture ponds, putrescible processing worm farms or solar energy generation fields belonging to and generating benefit for the local community. Perhaps our definition of urban open space should be broad enough to include land uses for new types of sustainable technologies, owned and operated by the community for the community, for the present and the future. 
 

40 Tiraumea Drive
Pakaranga
Auckland