Tue, May 05, 2015 page8

• From rooftop additions to city oasis

  • By Monica Kuo 郭瓊瑩
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  The Taipei City Government has been very enthusiastic about promoting the “garden city” concept and its “edible” landscape, with the government taking the lead in farming and planting vegetables. The initiative has led to wide public debate.

  The garden city concept was conceived by Ebenezer Howard in the UK in 1898. It is a utopian concept of urban development that surrounds human communities with farms or gardens, with the ultimate goal of balancing residential, industrial and agricultural areas. The garden city concept provides a vision for urban planning.

  Hence, the garden city concept is a planning concept. The best example in Taiwan would be Jhongsing New Village (中興新村) in the city of Nantou, where pedestrian lanes are separated from car lanes and the residential units form a radial pattern. Every unit has a front and a rear garden and there are green areas, public spaces, parks and so on.

  However, idealized utopian cities and towns like this still fall in the category of new towns when the concept is experimented with in many countries, and examples of failures abound. Nonetheless, the ideal remains, and the concept also existed in the Peach Blossom Land of Chinese poetry and legend, where everything coexisted in harmony.

  In other words, the garden city is a concept and a value that balances the quality of living and the environment. The concept has evolved and spun off ideas such as green cities, eco-cities and sustainable cities that are all rooted in the core garden city concept.

  Today, as the garden city concept has become a slogan for urban development, it has been simplified to mean a city with fields and gardens. In their pursuit of quickly tangible political achievements, politicians have further simplified the concept so it now only means a city with vegetable gardens or flower gardens — this would break the heart of Ebenezer Howard if he were still alive today.

  Just because there are vegetable or flower gardens, that does not make a city an eco-city or a sustainable city. That would further depend on how these green spaces, vegetable gardens, flower gardens and parks are interconnected with the city’s hydrology and geology.

  The garden city movement should be encouraged, which, with the addition of urban agriculture, could increase the value of ecological service systems, as well as the production on idle city land in the city and in rooftop and vertical gardens. However, a garden city is not built in a day, nor can it be achieved with superficial ornamentation.

  If the government builds a few vegetable gardens to make its performance palpable to city residents, but these developments run counter to the core value of the garden city concept, that would be a terribly misleading policy.

  The urban agriculture movement in the West encourages the use of the simplest and most convenient methods on vacant spaces, small or odd lots of land, or even parks and roofs of government and school buildings to actively engage city residents directly in these projects through community development. Old buckets, used wooden boxes and the like could be used as containers in vegetable and flower gardens. The purpose of this practice is not for gain, but to spread the concept of reducing the carbon footprint.

  Today, the Taipei City Government is attempting to use an engineering approach to building urban gardens, a practice that runs counter both to the fundamental value of agriculture and the operational principles of a sustainable city. One can only speculate as to what agronomic and horticulture experts and academics would think if sprinkler trucks would have to be used because rainwater could not be recycled to irrigate urban gardens, and if it were not possible to take advantage of the environment and grow suitable plants on the land.

  A garden city would include “edible” landscapes on every house’s terrace, balcony, rooftop or window, or public vegetable gardens and flower gardens in schools and on government buildings, but the concept should never be executed based on an engineering mentality. Urban agriculture is such a simple and profound production concept, that instead of building vegetable gardens on concourses, refuge islands and construction sites, the government should invite experts to work together and promote a healthy, organic and feasible urban agriculture movement for all city residents.

  Monica Kuo is the chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Chinese Culture University.

  Translated by Ethan Zhan
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