Sustainable cities,sustainable minds,sustainable schools: Pop-Up-Farm as a connecting device

Establishing the idea of a learning hub for the urban mind

John Ruskin spoke to an age that was in the formative stages of urbanizing, and successfully established an illusion of the relationship between nature and ourselves which remains to this day. Whilst he foresaw and forewarned of many of the potential challenges that humankind would face as a result of urban life, nothing could have prepared him for the current challenge we face at the start of the 21st century, and the environmental crisis we are watching unfold. We need to connect the rural and the urban, conceptually and practically in the form of an easy to use, readily consumable idea of sustainability. Perhaps that proposition is an oxymoron, but I have been experimenting with it to foster a way of doing, rather than rehearsing sustainable learning – and establishing as a result something that seems temporary but could serve longer term needs, I have called it a ‘Pop-Up-Farm’ (see www.pop-up-farm.com). Pop-Up-Farms are simple devices to facilitate thinking and action on the very basic notions of sustainable living – they take the themes of energy, waste, water, soil, building and growing and through these starting points people set up challenges and activities which in turn create imaginative responses, solutions and experiments which are used to guide, inform and stimulate new ways of responding to the challenges of sustainable living.

In this think-piece I explore what this can mean in terms of the school as the centre of a sustainable community where we visualize differently urban space and school space and generate a new outlook on learning.

I have argued throughout my recent work (Clarke, 2011) that if society is to remediate the catastrophic ecological crisis situation in which we find ourselves, we need to modify our ways of living and learn a different set of skills that lead to new behaviour, and subsequently a different kind of future, one that is both sustainable and environmentally conscious. Part of the big picture we need to urgently comprehend, because civic society depends upon it, is to re-imagine the urban mind and establish the conditions for urban space as a source of sustainable practice.

A new idea of the school

One such method of progressing this practice comes through the growing of more of our food in the urban setting. A good location for this is the school – a natural source of community life, and a potential hub for new thinking about how to re-imagine the urban space. This is needed to establish both a more sustainable mechanism of food production that does not result in ever increasing oil miles, but also and perhaps more importantly to embed a natural dynamic within the urban space that is the foundation of our learning, the new school, a school founded on principles and practices of sustainable living. This implies a conceptual break from the consensual modern view that the urban and the rural are two different environments, and that schools are there to service an economic model based upon consumerism and endless industrial growth with no apparent consequences. The point being that we can and should intervene. To this end it is possible to argue that we ‘garden’, we manipulate space to serve a new goal, and what we have at present is in fact simply a differently manipulated setting, in the main manipulated by ourselves for our benefit, whether the natural environment has a future place remains to be seen.

Connecting rural and urban

At face value, there is one hugely important agenda which day to day most of us barely consider: how we might feed ourselves in the next couple of decades as the price of oil rises and therefore costs of food production become ever greater. This small but important issue permeates every aspect of contemporary life and specifically raises questions of the need for food security and focuses us upon the challenge of improving the quality of the environment we find ourselves building in our urban homesteads, to ensure safety of food supply and an educated population who can cope with an emerging global crisis. But the challenge is also perhaps more fundamental. It is to radically rethink the artificiality that comes in a distinction between urban and rural, something we continue to teach our young people in school, and consequently perpetuate as a myth that separates us from understanding our place as part of a natural system. This is a concern that has considerable practical importance. Can we go on thinking that the city is where we do business and the countryside is where we grow the food to feed us? What does that distinction in relationship do to the collective consciousness, particularly in regard to our relationship with life-sustaining eco-systems?

Schools – Seed-beds of hope

Historically our urban spaces were also food spaces, but industrialization has changed this relationship. We might ask if this is now due for a rethink, where we might develop the transitional skills to move from an industrial linear system, and embed food back into the urban setting? That is the rationale for what we might call a Pop-Up-Farm for cities. We use and manipulate the idea of a farm, but not the farm as we know it. Farms are ingrained in the modern mind as producers of food; in the Pop-Up-Farm we simply manipulate the farm metaphor to use it to ‘grow’ practical experimentation for a sustainable community. To facilitate this, we can play with the school site as a forum for new learning about the new urbanism, re-establishing a direct link to the natural world through water, waste, energy and food, for example; in each case there are practical connections that school has to each element. Farming traditionally concerns itself with growing and yields. I suggest we use the metaphor to grow sustainable places and this is why schools are significant; they retain a place of importance in the popular imagination as places of possibility and hope, the elements can serve as pointers to experiments in sustainable thinking and doing. Culturally, we expect a lot from our schools as the seed-beds of hope for the next generation; so schools as the promoters of sustainable living can become important strategic indicators, of both community and societal progress in response to the ecological challenge. They will provide the ideas for and of the urban space, with connecting technology, open source sustainability know-how and social networking locked perhaps into the school setting as a feature of urban learning. They become the learning hub for the new urban mind.

Education for eco-urbanism

An awareness of the need to design space for human existence that is comprehensible and not alienating to the general population brings with it a need for clarity and coherence. The clarity comes through the insights that can be drawn from real-time experiences, where people are responding to the ecological challenges they encounter with new and innovative solutions. Urban growing schemes are now a widespread feature of most city landscapes, tucked away on rooftops, stealing a patch on a street corner or a derelict site. As evidence of these small, inventive and imaginatively conceived projects grow, it is becoming clearer that there are recurring patterns of activity that are being adopted by people in different geographical locations. Whilst we are very much in the emergent stages of what might be called a new urban food paradigm, and we do not know as yet if all or any of these solutions will work (for example, in generating sufficient food of sufficient quantity to make any substantive contribution to the food security issue); what is clear is that there is a place for capturing, studying and disseminating the new thinking and learning for wider social benefit and adoption, and perhaps the place to connect these practices within a community is school.

If such action were to happen in schools, then school becomes a new kind of knowledge-generating and knowledge-using resource, and its actions can begin to include a focus on sustainable learning skills. Being available within every community setting, they serve as a socially useful resource. This implies that there needs to be a form of sharing what we learn across diverse and contextually different environments, and utilizing the strengths of human ingenuity and creativity to devise solutions to suit the many places we adopt as our home.

Tapping and reviewing existing solutions

A form of open-source modelling is the key to this response – a methodology that can capture, study and disseminate the learning. Through open-sourcing, the practical and theoretical ground is no longer locked to one epistemological design, it becomes a collective interest of those who decide to participate; responsibility is both to one’s own action and in turn the lessons learnt and the challenges identified become questions for the larger collective of participants that are involved at any given time in the projects. This notion is not particularly new; it is a form of thinking that has been evolving within the information technology community for some considerable time. The transfer of the open-source concept to practical physical activity offers great opportunities for people to mimic and revise existing solutions and gain from earlier models and ideas. This has been a regular feature of the lexicon of designers and urban planners for more than a century (e.g. Howard, 1902) and more recently has been reconceived in the form of pattern technology (Alexander, 1977) and is beginning to show itself in the work of smart cities or eco-cities (Lim & Liu, 2010). However, urban planners and architects are not the only engineers of human action. Educators also contribute to the intellectual condition within which new generations entertain how to learn to live in an urban space. As such, we have a role to play in establishing the first principles of an understanding of what it means to live in a sustainable manner.

Developing smart eco-cities

Part of that engagement as ‘ecologically’ literate educated citizens comes through the examination of what we mean by quality, particularly the sustainable quality of life that such environments might be able to offer. Simply adding an ‘eco’ prefix to cities is not sufficient to ensure that the lifestyle on offer is capable of meeting the nuances of individual need whilst ensuring the permanence of the wider system. The smart ‘eco-city’ that is envisaged in much of the contemporary debate about future cities, recognizes the need for intelligent responses to contemporary environmental challenges, whilst not ignoring the possibilities of technological advances. This raises some important questions of engagement: there is a difficulty in this because any technological enhancement removes the locus of action from the reach of many people and communities and retains it in the hands of the larger corporate bodies. I think this is a mistake, both politically and practically, to rely on such a route to sustainable solutions. By contrast, Pop-Up-Farm deliberately roots itself in the practicalities of both ambition and action: to achieve leanness and low-tech thinking, it is embedded in the achievable, where the methods, tools and equipment are cheap and easy to access, are suitable for small-scale application but can be accessible across entire systems, and maintain our need for creativity and innovation (Schumacher, 1973). Pop-Up-Farm does not rule out technological solution, it merely elevates the importance of participatory role of communities – either dispersed communities adopting connecting methods such as open-source, or localized communities such as individual sites (Pop-up-Farm schools) where the educational provision enables learners to engage in curricula which are responsive to identified needs, questions and challenges and are then pursued through to real solutions.

Start with the school

Perhaps it is easiest to think about this in terms of scale, and again we have a solution embedded directly in our existing communities. To learn to live sustainably we do not need to think at the scale of a megacity development, nor an entire education system; we think of school – and incorporate within it a Pop-Up-Farm. Experience drawn from urban growing projects around the world suggests that we look to the immediate and the practical, at a scale people can personally comprehend and most important act upon (see www.school-of-sustainability.com for more details, and Clarke, 2011). So whilst a backyard, a window ledge, a wall, a street all become legitimate territory for action, they do not necessarily have the communicative carrying capacity that a centre of education, such as a Pop-Up-Farm might hold. So extend this one stage further and we begin to consider the public space, the health centre, or indeed, the schoolyard and school base. This has been the locus of change for the many community food programmes in progress: we start with serious change at the micro, we establish them as workable schemes, and we begin to connect them together to form an interdependent technology – a renaissance for the urban mind, a learning hub.

Zero is the measure of our collective action

So what is the measure of our collective action to be as we move forward with this agenda? We have grown accustomed to the metric of large-scale as a good, in terms of growth, and progress and development in terms of scale and size. Our new defining characteristics of success might better be thought of as being the achievement of zero! So, to aim for zero:

We can begin to fashion the schema of our new metric which in turn enables us to report in a new way the success of our school systems. We need to establish new ways of thinking and to understand the cityscapes we increasingly find ourselves living in as zero environments. This is clearly of great interest and potential as our existing solutions are failing to rectify past, capitalist growth-focused failure.

When we talk of eco-cities and smart cities we run the danger of revisiting the utopian dreams of yesteryear, where the old idea of masterplans for cities generated what Mark Jarzombek (2010) calls an ‘illusion’ of the city: ‘A place where social and economic problems, and politics have all been photo-shopped away’ (Jarzombek and Hwangbo, 2011). The danger of the masterplan is the elimination of the day-to-day realities. The great advantage of the micro-change approach is the day-to-day realities are the drawing board for contact and connection, they define the sustainability contextually. Instead of establishing conditions for sustainability, we use these micro-plans that arise from urban growing projects, with all of their nuanced and sensitive solutions to the small locales they operate within as the foundations of an eco-revolution. This is the realpolitik as it is based upon existing failed infrastructure, failed political alliances, and short-term greenscape fixes. That is why from an educational perspective we must begin in the places we currently use, our schoolyards, our public spaces, our health centres, parks and derelict sites. There is vast potential for revision and experimentation, but it has to form into something of overarching purpose, and this is where the focus on food provides a significant opportunity for new thinking.

What happens in those places is becoming a movement of people reclaiming the city for themselves. They are generating the data sets for our new urban learning hubs, the fertile growing spaces created in schoolyards are an extension of just such schemes, what may look like an innocent raised bed is actually the representation of a radical realignment of human thinking about the urban space as the knowledge of how, why and where emerges.

School of sustainability as the new urban farm

In our ‘Pop-Up-Farm’ schools in the UK (Burnley), Africa (Ghana and Uganda), Australia (Darwin and Adelaide), and Canada (British Columbia) we are exploring the numerous ways in which they can use their schoolyards as part of an open-source sustainability concept. We begin to see the possibilities of the zero option, where a pattern of activity leads to measureable effects and deeper insights against critical sustainability themes. Our interest is not just focused on the growing of a few vegetables, but instead, on the ways in which the focus on growing food can stimulate a whole set of relationships across a school site to inform and guide community learning about urban sustainability. The more we have done this, the more we begin to understand that the marginal activity such as a vegetable or flower bed can function below the policy radar, but can be used as a Trojan horse, to establish a starting point of action through which people can begin to think and act radically through education for the world we occupy. This is a foundation to influence the world we might be moving towards.

In the case of the Pop-Up-Farm project for example, we have already seen how this has extended across an entire community. The project in Burnley, Lancashire, now has all 36 of the primary schools in the town involved in a network of enquiry into growing food, managing waste, water and energy and retrofitting buildings to serve a new ecologically focused age. Our interest was a change in the social behaviour, and a challenge to the practical choices we make as we go about daily life. As yet this work remains in the early stages of development, but important pointers are nevertheless emerging of how to facilitate change.

A flowering of projects

Instead of a masterplan, there are a multitude of micro-projects underway (from backyard eggs, to hydroponics, bread-making, orchard planting, cheese-making, plant growing and bee-keeping) which can be examined in terms of yield potential, soil fertility and management sciences, uses of vertical growing spaces, design and development of micro-schemes for walls and rooftops, water capture processes, passive solar gain projects all serve as templates for providing people with the types of solutions that they require. In particular, they challenge the myth of that industrialized view of nature and people not mixing. In growing in the urban space, and establishing a new paradigm for that growing and including learning as a central feature of the work in progress, we begin to see the prospect of a new form of urban life, based around day-to-day capabilities, not some utopian design but a curriculum for life, and of life.

Schools in the vanguard of change

The experimental projects that we are starting to establish through Pop-Up-Farm get beyond the implausibility of ‘nature as happy, green and friendly’, and initiate a simple practical pursuit of imaginative solutions. This takes us out of the predictable frameworks through the integration of urban and rural by bringing a new form of learning to the townscape. It has to be noted that this also has little to do with generating ‘local’ produce, which perpetuates a particular form of market-trading promoting elite foods, distinct from all other foods and which often maintains an inequality of access for people to sustainable life choices. Instead, by growing food inside city space experiments with the new urban idea, it represents a way of responding to the food security crisis, first symbolically, and perhaps at a later stage, as an embedded feature of the urban landscape and mindscape. That is why the potential gains of using schoolyards as the urban Pop-Up-Farm are so attractive, as they connect a number of important elements together. School is a point of contact for a community of people. There is a shared interest in making the learning context real and provocative and purposeful for the participants involved.

A school of sustainability

So I think that the Pop-Up-Farm points us towards a way of thinking about sustainability education that is not defined through the lens of the traditional school. Instead it represents the attitude of sustainability in practice, a way of providing a design through which community food security can begin to become a feature of a new curriculum for urban life, a curriculum that sees growing, and experimentation of growing, in the urban setting as part of a vast, urban open-source learning programme.

Summary

In his Reith Lectures of 1995, Cities for a small planet, Richard Rogers presented some startling data that illustrated the effect that the car had made to the urban designed space. ‘An efficient parking standard requires twenty square meters for a single car. Even supposing that only one in five inhabitants owns a car, then, a city of ten million (i.e. London) needs an area about ten times the size of the City of London just to park cars’ (Rogers, 1997, p. 36). The streets, street corners, design of everything from signage to lampposts are all driven by the needs of the motorist. It is an interesting observation of the way that our small choices dictate how we live. In a recent publicity project, we drew attention to the space the car takes by ‘renting’ a car parking space for an entire day and laying a vegetable patch, complete with plants on the parking bay of a city high street. The resulting interest from the people who passed by was startling. Quite what such actions lead to we do not know. However, it helps people to imagine what a city might look like if there were no cars. Radicalizing the urban mind is not difficult, it is the identification of some starting points and examples that people need; once they get them, they do the rest themselves.

So a new space emerges, and into that space emerge new opportunities. Such is the present issue with schools and sustainable education, a glimmer of possibility lies ahead as we reconsider the appropriateness of the school for the ecological age. It is as significant a moment as that which began compulsory schooling more than a 150 ago, a moment when we can imagine again the Scale – planetary, Scope – centuries, and Stakes – civilization’s needs for the 21st century, and take a risk.

Ruskin’s imaginative leap to the garden city was formed at a time before the pervasive effect of the car; it served to inform a view of ourselves and nature that has persisted until now. It is time for us to step beyond that romanticized industrial mind, to put industrialism away and to see cities as our new natural places, and use that as the basis of a practical food-inspired revolution. That revolution will begin to redefine the artifice of natural and urban, with the school as the pivotal place to model this new learning. Through that redefinition we may be able to see what the new urban mind could become.