Even Torontonians like to hear about other places from time to time. That’s why the latest green-themed issue of Spacing features articles from Rotterdam, San Francisco, Los Angeles and, yes, Montreal. The magazine’s editors were kind enough to give me space to talk about our contaminated community gardens and some of the creative ways that people here are dealing with that problem. Here’s a taste of what I wrote:
Montreal’s city-wide garden program was launched in the 1970s, but after a thirty-year increase, the number of people who use it seems to have levelled off. Now, faced with the spectre of soil contamination, some are looking outside the box – or the garden plot, you could say – for more innovative and adaptable approaches to community gardening.
On a sunny and unseasonably warm October day, McGill University architecture professor Vikram Bhatt takes me to see one of those innovations: the Edible Campus, a small but highly-functional container garden installed on a concrete terrace at McGill’s downtown campus. In a few dozen plastic containers, spread over no more than 1,000 square feet, enough tomatoes, ground cherries, herbs and other fruits and veggies are grown to supply a full third of the food needed by Santropol Roulant, a local meals-on-wheels service.
“It has become so natural,” says Bhatt. “You couldn’t imagine that this was not here before. People hang around, walk through it, people sit on the steps [nearby]. It attracts more people around the area and it’s become a very attractive corner.”
Since it opened last spring, the Edible Campus has given a real sense of place to what was previously an empty space. Put a bunch of plants in some boxes on a concrete tarmac, it seems, and you’ll not only grow a large volume of healthy fruits and vegetables, you will create a spot where people can meet, mingle and interact with food they might otherwise find, processed and packaged, on supermarket shelves.
You can read the rest, which includes some ideas about where to build container gardens as well as some nice observations from Professor Bhatt about the social and cultural benefits of community gardens, over at Urbanphoto. As for the rest of Spacing, well, you don’t have to know Toronto very well to find it interesting. There are plenty of great articles in this issue, including a guide to eating your neighbourhood park, an interview with David Suzuki and all of the public space geekery for which Spacing is known and loved.
If you happen to be travelling to Toronto this weekend, you could even hang around for an extra day to attend Spacing’s release party, which will take place this Monday at 8:30pm. (Yes, it’s okay to have fun in Toronto. But not too much fun.) See Spacing Toronto for more details.
One comment
I had fun in Toronto twice today.