Making the vegetable garden permanent in front of City Hall would have been a wonderful thing. Sigh. Click the first image to enlarge:
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sustainability
I’m a huge fan of dense urban development, of making population centers that allow lots of people to live on small parcels of land with amenities within walking distance or available via public transit. I think suburban sprawl is unhealthy (nobody walks), causes pollution (driving everywhere) and is unsustainable given its extremely high resources consumption (which is finally becoming understood).
So it’s exciting to see legislation designed to start curbing sprawl and to encourage dense development centered around transit (from the San Francisco Chronicle):
Many California planning and environmental groups are heralding the passage of legislation designed to address global warming by curbing suburban sprawl as a watershed moment, perhaps the state’s most important land-use law in more than 30 years.
“It’s a sea change in the way we’re planning and funding growth and development,” said Stephanie Reyes, senior policy advocate with San Francisco’s Greenbelt Alliance. “The winds are shifting, and this is the time to get on board.”
But she and other advocates acknowledge that the importance of SB375, signed into law by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in late September, lies as much in the tone it sets as in what it will accomplish, which remains unclear.
Essentially the law, which will take years to implement, uses incentives and requirements to encourage local governments and builders to concentrate growth in urban areas or close to public transportation hubs in an effort to reduce Californians’ use of cars and lower their greenhouse gas emissions.
The ultimate impact will depend on how the legislation is put into effect, and whether its carrots and sticks will outweigh the cries from people who don’t want big new buildings on their block.
Whatever the law’s accomplishments, proponents hope it sends a clear message that will be reflected in future legislation and policies on the state and local levels: Dense, transit-oriented development is a critical goal for the collective good.
“A small step can be an important step if it’s the step that turns the corner,” said Tom Adams, board president of the California League of Conservation Voters, the principal drafter of the legislation. “I think it will change forever the way we look at land use in California.”
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I’m not a fan of grass. You know, lawns. Homogeneous ground covering, cut to be strangely level and squared off. I think it looks really unnatural… really, well, fake… it’s real but doesn’t look real (don’t even get me started on astroturf… shudder).
And all the maintenance, the gas that’s burned to keep cutting the stuff and the crazy amounts of water used to keep it green… it’s absurd.
So I was happy to find an entry in Dwell Blog about Fritz Haeg’s “Edible Estates Garden” at Descanso Gardens in Southern California. One one side he planted a standard lawn and on the other a vegetable garden. Ten months later the lawn looks, well, like a lawn while the vegetable garden had exploded into an abundance of colors and textures as different plans filled in the space.
I talk a lot about how simple ideas can yield amazing results, about how doing things a little differently can make a huge difference and a huge improvement. I consider vegetable gardens in place if lawns to be a no-brainer. And if veggies are a little too “on the farm,” how about an herb garden or a flower garden or a low water xeriscape. Instead of that lowest common denominator of yard plantings, grass.
Dwell Blog has some great pictures of the Edible Estates Garden.
Here in San Francisco we have a vegetable garden too. It’s in the middle of the Civic Center. Right in front of City Hall. It’s fantastic and I really hope it not just becomes permanent but is expanded into the rest of the plaza now occupied by wet and muddy lawns.
Opened July 1st, San Francisco’s veggie garden was planted by Slow Food. According to their site, Slow Food is “a non-profit, eco-gastronomic member-supported organization that was founded in 1989 to counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people”™s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.”
At the opening San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said, “It”™s about our suburban areas being connected to our rural areas, and being connected to our urban areas. This is an urban setting, a dense urban environment, one of the densest urban centers in America, yet here we are planting gardens.”
It looks great, it’s fun to walk around and it produces vegetables. No brainer!
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