Grown in the City: Planning Meets Planting

“I think peo­ple are look­ing for some­thing that they can have kind of imme­di­ate con­trol of,” John Reinhardt, urban plan­ner and edi­tor of the pop­u­lar Grown in the City blog site, told Organic Connections. “We’ve been through a cycle where cities were emp­tied out. Now indi­vid­u­als and fam­i­lies are com­ing back to the cities, and they seem to be bring­ing with them the lessons that we’ve always had with us. In the past 20 years or so peo­ple have been very occu­pied with mak­ing money and tech­nol­ogy and things like that, and I believe they are really start­ing to turn the cor­ner and crave get­ting their hands dirty again. So I think that it’s an activ­ity peo­ple can see; they can watch some­thing grow and they can do it them­selves, even if they have to do it on their own bal­cony, like I do.”

Such folk will have plenty of help from Grown in the City. Since March of 2010, the site has been reg­u­larly cov­er­ing gar­den­ing, com­mu­nity projects, DIY projects, guer­rilla gar­dens, urban food pol­icy and much more. Of course there are writ­ten sto­ries, but there are also plenty of videos, pho­tos and interviews—all deal­ing with the many facets of urban gardening.

“There are many dif­fer­ent types of fea­tures,” Reinhardt said. “People who are look­ing for do-it-yourself projects or a week­end project could def­i­nitely ben­e­fit by check­ing out the site and find­ing how to build a self-watering con­tainer or how to start their seeds. Policymakers and peo­ple who want to influ­ence and edu­cate pol­i­cy­mak­ers can also really ben­e­fit from the site. For exam­ple, if you are fight­ing a zon­ing bat­tle, you could direct your city coun­cil mem­ber or your zon­ing board to come by and check out what other cities are doing. There’s a good recep­ta­cle of infor­ma­tion there. Then I do an inter­view every Thursday; so peo­ple who just want to find out really inter­est­ing sto­ries about really inter­est­ing peo­ple in this space can learn a lot from that as well.”

The blog sprang from a com­bi­na­tion of John Reinhardt’s career and his pas­sions. “I’m an urban plan­ner by train­ing,” he said. “I was edu­cated at the University of Pennsylvania, with a degree in urban design and urban plan­ning. I’ve always been inter­ested in sus­tain­abil­ity and gardening—I grew up with a kitchen gar­den in my back­yard on Staten Island. So, pro­fes­sion­ally I work in the urban plan­ning realm, but per­son­ally my inter­ests have aligned with those other things. I started Grown in the City to kind of merge these two fields, which I saw rapidly converging.”

The site is not a com­mer­cial ven­ture, and Reinhardt obtains assis­tance from his computer-programmer cousin as well as from a team of friends in dif­fer­ent fields, mostly plan­ning, land­scape, archi­tec­ture and urban design. Everyone involved is inter­ested in urban gar­den­ing and con­tributes to the content.

Click any image above to see a larger version.

Another fea­ture of the site that peo­ple find very help­ful is assis­tance with zon­ing reg­u­la­tions as regards the grow­ing and sell­ing of food. “We have an inter­ac­tive zon­ing code map,” Reinhardt explained. “People can come online, click their state and locate their city, then find out what the cur­rent zon­ing codes are. As new leg­is­la­tion or codes are passed, peo­ple can update them online. This way they’ll know exactly what they can keep and what they can grow and what they can sell, based on their city.”

A recent and quite pop­u­lar fea­ture of the site is a map show­ing local­i­ties that have passed laws relat­ing to food sov­er­eignty. “We found a story that a town in Maine had passed an ordi­nance declar­ing food sov­er­eignty,” Reinhardt recounted. “This is basi­cally say­ing that a local pro­ducer and local con­sumer could enter into their own agree­ment to exchange food and sell food for money with­out the reg­u­la­tion of the state or fed­eral gov­ern­ment. Maine was kind of rev­o­lu­tion­ary because it was the first state to do that. It’s still unclear whether this will hold up in court, but it was a state­ment that the local food move­ment has been rec­og­nized and it’s been cod­i­fied in a local ordinance.

“We ran the story, which got picked up and shared thou­sands of times. Then we developed—in a sim­i­lar way to the food zon­ing map—a food sov­er­eignty map. People can now click on that map and find out what states and cities have food sov­er­eignty ordi­nances. They can even use the texts of those to draft one for their own com­mu­nity. It’s a way to get infor­ma­tion out to oth­ers and to help make this group gel by shar­ing knowl­edge about it.”

For Grown in the City, there is much more to come. “We’d like to see the site con­tinue to grow,” Reinhardt con­cluded. “We have ideas for new maps and tech­nol­ogy prod­ucts that we want to develop; but over­all we’d really like to see the site become a com­mu­nity for peo­ple to give feed­back and share. We just launched a job board as well where peo­ple can go on line to find food sys­tems jobs, and that’s again totally open source. So our theme is to have things that are curated by us, but which are devel­oped by the entire com­mu­nity that’s look­ing at these issues.

To explore Grown in the City, visit www.growninthecity.com.