Following up on my previous very-brief discussion of rooftop gardens, I recommend reading “Can an urban agriculture plan cultivate NYC’s community gardens?” by Caroline Spivak.
New York had no tradition of community gardens until the 1970s, when the city’s population hit its post-WWII low and when thousands of old tenements and rowhouses burned down, mostly from arson. People started planting gardens, and farming on a very small scale on the newly-vacant land in formerly overcrowded neighborhoods like the Lower East Side. Of course, the 70s were more than 40 years ago, so this new idea is now an old tradition.
Spivak lays out the current tension: the city’s population is up by well over a million people since the minimum, and more housing is desperately needed. (There have been few eras in the city’s history when more housing wasn’t badly needed.) The land taken by the gardens could house quite a few people, but taking the gardens to do so would reduce the quality of life for everyone in those neighborhoods.
A little over a year ago, I said that engineering is not the solution to all problems and I still believe that to be true. I actually believe it more strongly than I did a year ago, as that feeling has been getting steadily stronger for the last twenty-five years. That said, engineering offers a way that possibly both community needs – housing and workable green space – can be met: putting farms on the roofs of both new and existing buildings. It is, ultimately, a very small increase in the total cost of a new apartment house to make the roof strong enough to carry three or four feet of soil, and it’s possible to reinforce a roof to carry soil without working inside the building. There are benefits in terms of insulation and water retention, but the main benefit would be that housing and community gardens can occupy the same pieces of land.
There would be a lot of logistics to work out with such a scheme. The people growing food and other plants in the gardens are distrustful of both developers and the city government, and not without reason. So saying “let us destroy your garden and you’ll get it back in a couple of years” would probably not work well. The technical answer to that problem is staging, where a few buildings with plantable roofs are built on non-garden sites, a garden or two moved to them, and then those gardens developed, and so on. Such a scheme would mean coordination between a lot of different parties and lots, which is difficult. But it’s doable and this post is meant to be looking at the possibilities. There is no technical reason that the vast majority of apartment houses and tenements in the city couldn’t one day have planted roofs, which would be good for everyone. Some upgrades of roof structure would be needed, but that issue is nothing compared to the social and political problems that would have to be solved first…but it’s worth it.
The header image is a map of downtown Brooklyn from the 1870s, with the boundaries of the old farms drawn over the streets. There is no urban area in the US that wasn’t mostly rural or wilderness within the last 400 years; most within the last 250 years.
