Researcher conducts high-tech hunt for Chicago food
gardens
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Although press coverage of urban agriculture
sometimes seems to suggest that growing food in the city is a new phenomenon,
it’s really a tradition with deep roots in Illinois, and one that’s especially
strong in Chicago.
According to John R. Taylor, who is a doctoral
candidate in the UI Department of Crop Sciences, Chicago led the nation in
urban food production during World War II, with more than 1,500 community gardens
and 250,000 home gardens contributing to the victory garden effort.
Over the past decade, city planners and various
advocacy groups have sought to promote and support renewed interest in efforts
to grow food there and in other large cities. Why? Because home food gardens
produce all kinds of good. As Taylor points out, they reduce food spending and they
sometimes provide income through the sale of excess production. They increase
the consumption of fresh vegetables and improve the quality of diets by providing
easy access to fresh, nutritious produce. And they encourage agricultural biodiversity,
as well as the social goods of community building.
[Photos of home food gardens in Chicago by John R. Taylor.]
For planners, government officials, and advocates
who want to target their efforts effectively, it is important to know where
people are already growing food. But in Chicago, as in other major U.S. cities,
only limited information about the extent and locations of urban food
production has been available up to now. Most efforts to map it have included
only community gardens—as opposed to private ones—and they have depended on
active participation by people involved with the gardens.
In collaboration with his faculty advisor, Sarah
Taylor Lovell, John Taylor employed a new approach to mapping Chicago’s food
gardens and produced a far more comprehensive—and useful—document.
Working on a high resolution aerial image that was
generated by Google Earth, Taylor scanned the land area of the entire city, one
screen at a time, looking for visual indicators of food gardens—squares or
rectangles of bare earth or mulch, plants in rows, etc. He estimated the size
of smaller gardens using the ruler tool in Google Earth, and drew polygons
around the larger ones, which were then exported to a geographic information
system program. That program enabled him to calculate the number and area of
the gardens and merge the data about them with sociodemographic data about the
neighborhoods where they were located.
Taylor’s work also included on-the-ground visits
to a sampling of the sites identified from the aerial image, which allowed him
to gauge how accurate he had been in his analysis.
Overall, his effort showed that the community
gardens identified on previous maps are not particularly significant sites of
food production; only 13 percent of them had food producing components. (The
rest were primarily ornamental plantings—streetscapes and the like.) The food
production area of home gardens, including backyard gardens and gardens created
by residents on nearby vacant land, was much more considerable—three times the
amount of community gardens using a conservative estimate.
Precisely how this information may be useful in
future efforts to promote urban agriculture remains to be worked out. But
Taylor suggests approaches that emphasize scaling up home production of food
based on existing resources could succeed where top-down approaches lacking
local leadership have not.
