Tag Archives: Growing Community

Growing Pains

Posted on by
Reply

Greenbelt_mapIn the GTA the question of whether an individual municipality should continue population and economic growth isn’t up for debate. That question has already been decided. But what really needs to be considered is how to grow and the decisions that GTA municipalities are in the process of making now will shape our communities for decades to come.

To provide some context, other than Lake Ontario, there are no natural barriers to constrain the GTA’s outward growth. And since Lake Ontario has been subject to infilling, even it to a small extent has been encroached upon. And the result of no natural boundaries, supportive provincial policy, demand for single family homes, cheap fuel for our cars, big pipes and roads, etc. has been decades of unconstrained growth and sprawling suburban municipalities. (It’s a lot more complicated than that, so check out Frances Frisken’s The Public Metropolis: The Political Dynamics of Urban Expansion in the Toronto Region, 1924-2003 or John Sewell’s Shape of the Suburbs: Understanding Toronto’s Sprawl).

The pace of outward growth is now being disrupted by two pieces of provincial legislation: “The Greenbelt Act” and “The Places to Grow Act”. In short, the Greenbelt protects 1.8 million acres of land from development in 2005 and is based on supporting the environment, recreation and agriculture. Greenbelts aren’t a new concept. BC has an Agricultural Land Reserve and Ottawa also has a Greenbelt.

The companion piece of legislation is “The Places to Grow Act”. It charts out growth in the GTA until 2031 and expects an additional 3.7 million people to move to the GTA by then, bringing the total population to around 11.5 million. Plus, the plan includes the forecast for 1.8 million new jobs. On the maps it includes land designated between the Greenbelt and the developed area that has the potential for further outward development (it is commonly called the Whitebelt). Since Places to Grow was enacted in 2005 the province has given growth targets to regional municipalities and the regional municipalities are now in turn setting growth targets for their local municipalities (most suburban municipalities in the GTA are two tiered).

For most GTA municipalities it took around 5 years to get to the point where there is a clearer picture of what kind of growth targets they actually have to deal with. And now the question they all have to grapple with is how to grow. Between last year and this year most municipalities will be deciding how much of that growth will be intensification (within the current built up area) and how much will be in the Whitebelt (a lot of that is still being farmed). Some are toying with the idea of growing the Greenbelt, so the province now has guidelines for municipalities to follow. Markham, one of where I work, has yet to determine its intensification and is having a public meeting on Tuesday, February 16th.

The Greenbelt and Places to Grow have the potential and intention to move the GTA’s municipalities towards being more sustainable, livable, walkable, bikeable, transit oriented, compact and complete communities. But getting it right isn’t going to be easy. There are divided opinions within the suburbs; residents who want their community to stay suburban and others that want to urbanize, developers who want to continue building low density single family homes and others who are interested in density and condos, and farmers who want to sell their land to the highest bidder regardless of their intended land use and others who are desperately seeking long-term security to keep their farm where it is. It is complicated to say the least and no municipality is having an easy time with the decisions that they have to make.

Urban Tomatoes

Posted on by
2

My engagement with urban agriculture started with a gift to my husband Jim a few months before we moved to Toronto.  A close friend gave him eight small yellow envelops of seeds as a birthday present.  The uneven typing  on the envelopes read “White Queen,” “Tigerella,” “Lime Salad,” “Purple Cherokee,” “Yellow Pear,” “Black Seaman,” “Peasant’s Paste,” and “Druzba.”  They were heirloom tomato seeds from a Seed Sanctuary in Kingston, Ontario.

The following February we bought a seed starting tray, potting soil and a cheap grow light and planted a full tray of seeds.  The thought of growing tomatoes from seed, especially in a basement apartment with a north facing window, seemed like we were setting ourselves up for failure.  Up until this point the only tomato plants in my life had come from garden centres.  Every June, my parents would take us to buy tomato seedlings from warm, humid greenhouses scented with chemical fertilizers.  And now here we were starting tomato seeds in February, months before the potential plants would head outside in what seemed to be a totally inhospitable environment for heat and sun-loving tomatoes.

I was wrong about the tomatoes.  We ended up with over 40 healthy seedlings when it came time to transplant them to larger pots.  And then there was the question of where to put them.  The patch of grass outside our apartment window was ours to use but our landlord was insistent that we were only allowed to plant in pots.  It could handle a few plants, but what about the rest?  The need to find a place for our tomatoes led us to find Maloca Community Garden at York University, where Jim and I were both studying.  The initial e-mails sent to the garden were slow to be answered but in a short time we were showing up to regular community work days and had negotiated a plot for most of our tomatoes.  This was my introduction to community gardening and urban agriculture.

A lot has happened since that first introduction to growing food in the city.  That first year we invited a couple of on campus friends to help us out with our plot of tomatoes.  The tomatoes grew into a dense thicket (and were delicious).  That fall Jim and I were elected to the community garden’s steering committee and we spent the following season leading workdays, setting up a blog, fighting to get the garden on the campus map and trying to grow the “community” part of the garden in addition to the vegetables.  The third year we passed responsibilities of the garden over to a new steering committee but helped to get a new water tank and grew not only enough tomatoes for ourselves but also many for our communal plots.  That summer was when I started working in Markham, a large suburb north of Toronto, with a big part of what I’m focusing on related to local food and urban agriculture planning.

Community gardens and urban agriculture are moving into the mainstream.  And whether the trendiness of the 100 mile diet or the necessity caused by a global recession is the source of this current interest, there are a lot of reasons why our Canadian cities should be embracing community gardens and figuring out how agriculture can work in cities and suburbs.  Beyond the potential to reduce the carbon footprint of our food by growing and eating food we grow, there are other environmental benefits including reduced use of pesticides (most community gardens prohibit the use of all but the most natural pesticides), onsite management of organic waste through composting and much needed plant variety for our pollinators.  Plus community gardens can serve as great site for eco education and with a bit of management can help beautify communities.  Beyond the environmental benefits, there are also social, cultural and economic benefits to community gardens, including healthy food and physical activity, improved community safety, access to culturally appropriate foods, welcoming public space, increased food knowledge, affordable program to maintain, and improved partnerships throughout the community.  And there are also a lot of ways that cities can support community gardens including supportive land use policies, financial support, public-private partnerships, technical assistance with site and design, management of programs, education and design.