Urban Transformations
Part 2: The Urbanization of Food
Apart from news on the US presidency and the pandemic, 2021 greeted us with some concerning local
news: food prices have gone up. The price of the humble sili, a usual benchmark for food prices, was at
PhP 800 per kilo at the start of the year, along with other agricultural products. Scarcity was the
reported cause.
It is interesting how growing up in Cubao, running out of sili was unimaginable. My father was able to
grow sili, kamias, coconut, guava, cheza, langka, papaya, calamansi and others in our modest yard—
echoing the bahay kubo song. Today most of Cubao, just like many places in the metropolis, are paved
over, congested and built up, having no space for home farming.
Ask a child today where their food comes from and they are likely to answer “from the supermarket” or
“from the palengke”. Urban life has disconnected people from what feeds them. The disconnection
became very real when food supply chains were disrupted at the start of the Covid lockdowns. The
geographic and functional separation between food production and the city highlights the vulnerability
of our urban food system especially during a times of health, economic and climate crises. One of the
many ironies of our growing urban population is that we are paving over the land that feeds us.
The Need for Change
For the longest time, we've planned our cities around transportation, infrastructure, housing, and
recreational needs, all the while hoping that the rural lands around us would continue to produce food
and that we could continue to transport it from farther and farther away, even outsourcing our
agriculture to other continents. If we want to plan for livable and sustainable cities, then we need to
think about how our cities are fed. The increased disconnection between consumers and producers of
food means that urban populations also have a limited knowledge of the issues associated with modern
food production:
• Food consumption is responsible for 70% of the average global water footprint and 25% of
greenhouse gas emissions. Soil depletion, water pollution, biodiversity, are all impacted by
what we eat. Particularly important, is that as populations urbanize and become more affluent,
there is an increase in meat consumption and livestock production which puts a further strain
on the environment.
• According to the Food and Nutrition Research Institute, every Filipino wastes 3.9 kilos of rice per
year, amounting to $60 million or about P3.2 billion lost per year.
• Globally, cities occupy 2% of total land while croplands take up 7%, but the area consumed by
livestock including the agricultural land used to feed livestock consume 27% of total global land
area, more than the area occupied by forests. With increasing meat consumption brought about
by increasing urbanization and affluence, livestock grazing and crop production as feed for
livestock will further encroach into natural areas, putting biodiversity and natural systems at
risk.
• The globalized and industrialized nature of modern food production operate on efficiency
economies of scale which have focused on the propagation of select species that can withstand
long storage and transport (cash crops). This monoculture leads to biodiversity loss and the
vulnerability of crops and livestock to disease outbreaks (such as what happened during the
Potato Famine and more recently, the Swine and Avian Flu). More insidiously, global food
systems have also led to less ethical approaches such as the patenting of genetically engineered
plants for mass propagation, or the practice of international lending institutions to encourage
farmers in developing nations to produce food for export to wealthier nations, depleting the
capacity of countries to produce crops for domestic consumption (an extreme example was
when Ethiopia was still exporting food during its famine in the 80’s).
The UN estimates global food demand to increase by 50% in by 2040. More and more of this demand
will be coming from cities—as much as 80% according to some estimates. As space for agriculture
shrinks, climate change further aggravates the problem. Gwynne Dyer, author of Climate Wars, wrote,
“The rule of thumb is that we lose about ten percent of world food production for every rise of one
degree Celsius in average global temperature.”
Reconnecting Food and Cities
Crises often provoke the need to reintegrate food production into the urban realm. The planting of
Victory Gardens on all available vacant properties during the 2 World Wars created food security and
fostered solidarity and patriotism. The Organoponicos in Cuba allowed the country to be self-sufficient
in fruit and vegetables, addressing food shortages after the lifeline of imports from the Soviet Union
collapsed in 1989. Locally, numerous community gardens were spontaneously created in the midst of
the Covid pandemic, enabling neighborhoods to sustain themselves during the crisis.
Ideas for more deliberate and intensive integration of agriculture into the urban realm vary from the
pragmatic to the visionary, ranging from “Agrihoods”, Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes
(CPULs) of Bohn and Viljoen, Vertical Farms by Despommier and even MRDV’s provocative concept of a
Pig City: high-rises to grow livestock. Concepts of Urban Agro Ecology and Permaculture draw from the
central idea that agriculture could be an essential element of sustainable urban infrastructure.
Producing food in our cities creates multiple benefits, not just in addressing food security but also as a
form of ecological intensification. It is a way to conserve and replenish soils, to re-establish bio-habitats
and urban biodiversity, reduce and reuse food waste, conserve and reuse water, improve micro
climates, clean the air, create healthier communities, and so on. Effectively, urban agriculture allows
the flow of nutrients from the countryside to the city to go back to the land to grow more food, in a
circular loop.
Food also has a social value: it connects people through a web of social interactions. The production of
food multiplies opportunities for these interactions through the sharing or exchange of labor, inputs,
and produce or in engaging the youth and the elderly in productive activity. As more rural migrants
flock to cities, urban farming can offer a means of integration by offering livelihood that can
immediately utilize their skill, rather than risking exclusion, malnutrition and poverty.
While urban agriculture may not yield the level of output of conventional farming, key to its value is in
creating a tighter symbiosis between city and nature, blurring the artificial demarcation between urban
and rural and allowing ecological systems to flourish in the urban realm. The most influential urbanist,
Jane Jacobs in The Economy of Cities wrote, “Because we are so used to thinking of farming as a rural
activity, we are especially apt to overlook the fact that new kinds of farming come out of cities”.
Cities need an increased awareness of what it takes to sustain life and make space for it. Urban realms
need to become what the French sociologist Michel Foucault called ‘heterotopias’: places that embrace
every aspect of human existence simultaneously, capable of juxtaposing in a single space several aspects
of life. A mosaic of elements both rural and urban. In a future full of cities, we need more farmers, not
fewer.
Buhay sa DAR Gulay. Converting an unused football field into an urban vegetable garden in St.
John Bosco Parish, Tondo. Photo:
Organoponico in Cuba. Photo: Noah Friedman-Rudovsky
Urban “Agrihood” in Detroit: Communities designed around farms. Photo: Michigan Urban Farming
Initiative
Concept for a Vertical Farm by Dickson Despommier
Vertical farms in cities: Sunqiao Urban Agricultural District in Shanghai, by Sasaki
Pig City. Skyscraper livestock farming in the city by MVRDV
