Farms and gardens would be key to a self-sustaining 2,000-home development envisioned in British Columbia.
An eight-day charrette in May, led by Andres Duany, laid out an innovative, agriculturally-oriented path that new urbanists could start using in communities that are worried about losing farm land.
Duany and other new urbanists collaborated with Michael Ableman, an organic farmer and author, to show how a 538-acre tract near Vancouver, British Columbia, could accommodate nearly 2,000 housing units and at the same time foster a wide range of food-producing activities.
The new approach — “agricultural urbanism” — calls for carefully fitting numerous food-related activities, including small farms, shared gardens, farmers’ markets, and agricultural processing, into a walkable community.
“What’s unique about this project,” says Marina Khoury, director of town planning at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. (DPZ), “is that we’re trying to integrate agriculture and urbanism at all levels” — from high-density housing with window boxes, to somewhat less dense houses with kitchen gardens, to quarter-acre plots, 50-acre farms, and perhaps one 160-acre farm.
If the approach succeeds on the site just north of the US border, it could become an influential model, counteracting the interrelated problems of tightening world food supplies, surging energy prices, and rising transportation costs. A small number of agricultural and social reformers have argued for years that more of North America’s food should be produced close to where the consumers live; agricultural urbanism may be one way to accomplish that.
The tract, known as Southlands, consists of open fields, woodland, drainage ditches, and some built structures. Efforts to develop the land, in the Tsawwassen section of the suburban municipality of Delta, have been stymied by local opposition for two decades.
Two years ago Sean Hodgins, president of Century Group Lands Corp., which owns the vast majority of Southlands, set out to break the impasse by offering to preserve two-thirds of the site for agriculture, recreation, and educational uses while placing housing on the remaining one-third. He gathered two dozen residents to assemble a Southlands Community Planning Team, which then spent 16 months devising ideas for weaving agriculture through much of the development.
Once the Planning Team had hammered out a design brief (titled “A Vision for Agricultural Urbanism”), Duany was brought in to conduct a charrette, which included new urbanists such as Doug Farr, Bill Dennis, Patrick Condon, and Steve Mouzon.
Reconciling housing and agriculture
The charrette produced two slightly different master plans — both of them featuring networks of walkable streets and opportunities to engage in farming and gardening at many different scales. “One plan links to the existing neighborhood; the other pulls back,” says Bob Ransford, an urban land-use consultant to the Century Group. Forty-two percent of the land is preserved for agriculture, 26 percent is kept open for other purposes, and 32 percent is developed.
Ableman, whose Fairview Gardens in Goleta, California, reportedly has generated $1 million in annual revenue from 12 acres, told the charrette participants that the project would need at least 250 acres of farm land if it hoped to be “self-sustaining” — capable of feeding much of the population of Southlands or Tsawwassen. A proponent of regional food systems, Ableman is author of the books Fields of Plenty, On Good Land, and From the Good Earth.
The charrette proposed four principal scales of agriculture at Southlands. They are:
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•Rural agriculture, consisting of farms of 20 to 160 acres, including grazing, hunting, and periodically uncultivated land.
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•Small farms of 5 to 20 acres each.
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•Specialty farms of 1 to 5 acres.
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•“Intraurban agriculture,” including community gardens of 50 to 5,000 square feet; front gardens and kitchen gardens for individual residences; and container gardens (roof gardens, balcony boxes, and window boxes).
The specialty farms would be especially important, acting as transitions between the larger outlying agricultural expanses and the denser center where most of the population would live. Plans from the charrette show specialty farm areas of up to five acres that would extend like fingers into rural terrain.
Khoury says agricultural urbanism, as pictured at Southlands, differs from what new urbanists usually attempt. In new urbanist plans, “we’re used to seeing an urban-rural edge,” a relatively sharp demarcation, she says. At Southlands, by contrast, “we tried to weave it together.” Ransford elaborates that “the agriculture is physically brought in with a fairly jagged edge.”
The Planning Team identified may food-related activities that could be included in Southlands. They include:
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• Community gardens in neighborhoods and at the edge.
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• Allotment gardens where townhouse and apartment dwellers could rent small plots.
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• A market square with a focus on agriculture. Anchoring the market square would be a center for urban agriculture, occupying facilities that would be built for Kwantlen University College by the developer. Its backside would open up to farms, Ransford says.
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• A farmers’ market with mixed use and live/work units.
Culinary school and restaurant
The housing, at up to 80 units per acre, would include large and small houses inspired by Scandinavian design and low-cost dormitories for students. Some houses would be designed to accommodate secondary suites. Scandinavia, Duany explains, has produced wooden houses well-suited to the climate and resources of British Columbia; the houses, he notes, feature “window bands to welcome the weak winter light, a durable rustic strength appropriate to the agricultural ethos of Southlands, and a stunning red coloration from copper tailings (a wasted resource in Canada) used as a wood preservative.”
The denser part of the community has been laid out in one-acre squares, with each square having as few as four units and as many as 60 units. The developed area would average 12 units an acre. When streets and public space are excluded, the lots themselves would average 25 units an acre, not counting accessory apartments.
An orchard would greet people entering the community. A large pond would filter particulates from urban runoff before the water goes into a series of canals, according to the Vancouver Sun.
Making agriculture succeed
All of the smaller-scale agriculture would be organic, eliminating conflicts over pesticide spraying that sometimes arise where housing sits next to farms. A land trust would manage the agricultural lands, lease parcels to farmers, and prevent parcels from being sold and developed as years go by. The land trust would regulate some farming operations. “You can’t have every farmer growing the same crop” if the goal is to feed the local population, Khoury points out.
Farr, the Chicago architect, planner, and author of Sustainable Urbanism, worked on developing detailed checklists of the responsibilities of the various entities, including the municipality, the developer, and farmers. The team produced a Transect diagram showing where the various agricultural activities fit. They range from forageable land in T1 (natural zone) and T2 (rural zone); to community gardens in T2, T3 (sub-urban), and T4 (general urban); to roof gardens and balcony boxes in T4, T5 (urban center), and T6 (urban core).
Nobody knows how many people would be interested in doing the small-scale farming. The goal, Khoury says, is to make it profitable enough that they could do well at it.
After the charrette concluded on May 13, the plans were sent to architects and planners for at least six weeks of analysis and refinement, after which they will be presented to the public for further discussion. “It’s a greenfield site surrounded by residential suburban development on all sides,” Ransford notes. “There has been an anti-development attitude in the community.”
“The property is the last great undeveloped property outside the Agricultural Land Reserve in the Lower Mainland” of British Columbia, the Vancouver Sun reported. Hodgins hopes to apply for a development permit in 2009.
Ransford thinks the agricultural urbanism concept could be especially useful in regions that have urban growth boundaries. “Some of the worst urbanism is at the edge,” he observes. “Land sits there with developers speculating that it’s the next land for developing.”
Of the thinking that has gone into Southlands, Ransford says: “It’s a new ethos that will start to influence the New Urbanism. It’s a timely issue to be dealing with.”
This article is available in the June 2008 issue of New Urban News, along with images and many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue.
