Neighborhood farming
In the crowded classroom of a supplementary school on Lishui Street in Taipei City, 50 residents of the Jin’an Community are listening intently to the speaker on stage, Yu Fu-chun, the head of the social enterprise How’s Food. She is explaining up-to-date thinking about the healthiest ways to farm and eat. The response is gratifying, as people pepper the speaker with questions and engage in spirited discussion.
Professional community planner Sunny Chen, the Miracle Green City group (which includes trained community planners), and the chief of Jin’an Ward have worked together to set up a project for a micro-farm on the roof of the community activity center.
Chen, a vibrant and outgoing person filled with enthusiasm for life, was moved to action by a story she saw on the Internet education platform TED about some small towns in the UK that were promoting a policy of “edible landscaping”—replacing their purely decorative floral gardens with vegetable gardens. She put forward the idea in 2013, and it made a perfect fit with what Mica Hsiao was trying to do, so they started working together to promote micro-farms in the community. In order to ensure that local residents would have success with their vegetable gardens right from the start, they arranged for horticulture specialists to provide face-to-face guidance.
These kinds of activities bring vitality not only to public outdoor spaces, but to personal inner human spaces as well, making people more community minded. As an example of this attitude, Chen donates some of their vegetables to charitable organizations.
Meanwhile, Chen, Hsiao, and Yang Chunming recently created the XG Studio, and they are moving toward sustainable operations as a social enterprise. They will also offer a course at Da’an Community College to train “seed personnel” to engage in further promotion of community agriculture.
Citizen agriculture is not simply about putting idle space to some random use, or about some romantic best-of-both-worlds dream of becoming an “urban farmer.” It is mainly about sharing of knowledge and cooperation. “If everyone helps each other out,” says Chen, gazing with satisfaction at the flourishing rows of vegetables in the garden, “then something that once seemed like an impractical notion becomes a very real possibility.”