Featured Podcast
- Gastropod: Dig for Victory Historian Anastasia Day helps us explore the history of urban gardening movements—and shatter some of the nostalgic myths about those original World War II-era Victory Gardens.
Featured Video & Story
- Behind the Scenes at Warren Towers Rooftop Mini Garden (BU Today) Most campus rooftops are pretty barren, but thanks to a project launched last spring by a BU Terrier with a green thumb, tis summer the Warren Towers roof patio was transformed into a small urban oasis: a garden where dozens of different vegetables and herbs flourished.
Browse Films
- Urban Garden (streaming, Academic Video Online) Many U.S. urban centers were in the deep trouble during the early 1970s. New York City's housing stock and infrastructure were crumbling, crime skyrocketed, and the treasury was bare. There were more than 20,000 abandoned. City owned lots, many used as garbage dumps, drug-shooting galleries and place to abandon cards. In 1973 an artist named Liz Christy founder of the Green Guerillas, got some friends together and reclaimed as garden space an abandoned lot of Manhattan's Lower East Side. This simple act of grass roots activism began the community garden movement
- The Garden: Fighting for an LA Urban Garden (streaming, Kanopy) The fourteen-acre community garden at 41st and Alameda in South Central Los Angeles is the largest of its kind in the United States. Started as a form of healing after the devastating L.A. riots in 1992, the South Central Farmers have since created a miracle in one of the country's most blighted neighborhoods. Growing their own food. Feeding their families. Creating a community. But now, bulldozers are poised to level their 14-acre oasis.
- Growing Hope: the Homeless Garden Project (streaming, Academic Video Online) Imagine a vacant lot transformed into a productive garden, yielding bouquets of flowers and baskets of vegetables. Apply the same metaphor to homeless men and women, finding the rich soil of a cooperative project that gives them work, safety and community. You now have a sense of the elegantly simple concept of this garden project.
- Plant This Movie (streaming, Academic Video Online) Featuring leading urban farming advocates, the film explores the inspiring success story of Cuba, and travels globally to communities of urban farmers in Shanghai, Calcutta, Addis Ababa, London, and Lima. In the US, the film visits innovative projects in New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Philadelphia and Portland - including the largest rooftop garden in the world, blighted areas transformed into urban farms, student-run gardens and CSA, and other projects that show the explosion
- Urban Agriculture and Creating a Sustainable Foodscape (streaming, Academic Video Online) Food Tank co-founder and President Danielle Nierenberg moderates this webinar featuring Michael Carolan, author of No One Eats Alone. Michael was joined by Alice’s Garden Urban Farm Executive Director Venice Williams and DC Greens Executive Director Lauren Shweder Biel. The panelists discussed how urban agriculture can used to close the social and spatial barriers inherent in our current food system.
- Growing Cities (streaming, Academic Video Online) From rooftop farmers to backyard beekeepers, Americans are growing food like never before. Growing Cities goes coast to coast to tell the inspiring stories of these intrepid urban farmers, activists, and everyday city-dwellers who are challenging the way this country feeds itself.
- Reinventing the Rooftop: Hong Kong's Skyscraper Farms (streaming, Academic Video Online) -- Health has been increasingly on the menu in Hong Kong. Like many places, this so-called organic revolution has grown from the outskirts of the city, to the rooftops of skyscrapers over the years. But with limited space and expensive land, can this trend of local farming keep going? Bloomberg's Yvonne Man followed a dish from the farm to the table to find out.
- South Central Farm: Oasis In A Concrete Desert (streaming, Academic Video Online) Covers the high profile controversy over the South Central Farm in Los Angeles, the largest urban garden in the country.
- The Sky's The Limit (streaming, Academic Video Online) This segment of CBS Sunday Morning, produced by Mary Raffalli, is about rooftop gardens.
- How Community Gardens Can Save America (streaming, Library of Congress) uthor and urban farmer LaManda Joy wants to inspire everyone she meets to grow their own food. Her rallying cry "We can grow it!" recognizes the influence of the past while invigorating the American can-do spirit to create a positive future.
- Vacant to Vibrant: How to Turn Vacant Lots into Vibrant Plots (streaming, Academic Video Online) Vacant lots in your neighborhood can illustrate neglect and seem like a waste of space. But, these open spaces can also serve as clean canvases for creative community projects that bring positive change.
- Food revolution. French organic farming explores the unconventional (streaming, Academic Video Online) The FT's Harriet Agnew visits what will be the world's largest rooftop farm and a company growing strawberries and herbs in shipping containers. In the French countryside, she explores a chateau farm that shuns pesticides and ploughing, but is more accommodating to weeds and old machinery.
- Going to green. Episode 13, Urban agriculture and community gardens (streaming, Academic Video online) Examines the need for community gardens in urban areas of the country.
- Urban Agriculture with Zachary Nowak (TED Talk) Zachary Nowak received his PhD from Harvard University in 2018, and is a specialist on the history of food, urban agriculture and the means through which the state is connected to the public. In this talk, Nowak explains the fundamentals of Urban Agriculture, to what extent it is economically and socially viable, as well as answering wider questions on the role of food in climate change and how to think more sustainably in these sectors.
