[CPEO-BIF] Edible Cities: Urban Farming in Indianapolis, Indiana

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Edible Cities: Urban Farming in Indianapolis

Bob Hersh
September, 2009

In many cities, particularly those in the Midwest and the rust belt, 
planners and community groups are concerned less with Smart Growth than 
with what some have called "Smart Decline," the need to plan for 
"shrinking cities." One indicator of a shrinking city is the prevalence 
of vacant land within city boundaries. For example, in 2003, even before 
the recent wave of foreclosures, one out of every thirty homes in 
Indianapolis, Indiana - about 6,000 properties - were vacant or 
abandoned. More recent data suggests the number of vacant residential 
structures in the city is likely to have increased three fold, to 
18,000, while some 4,000 industrial and commercial properties have been 
abandoned as well.

This phenomenon of shrinking cities is playing out in other parts of the 
country. Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Youngstown, Buffalo, and 
Pittsburgh each have lost roughly half of their residential population 
in the past fifty years. Deindustrialization explains part of this 
exodus. But the roots of this phenomenon are more complicated. Changes 
in transportation, mortgage financing, tax policy, and zoning practices, 
as well as domestic tastes for larger lot sizes and larger houses, have 
created the vast network of suburbs that ring our cities. In addition, 
land use policies have extended supply chains with the help of our 
highway systems, leaving people further from their workplaces, 
manufacturers further from their customers, and farmers further from 
their markets. Food products, for example, typically travel between 
1,500 and 2,500 miles from farm to plate.

Faced with surplus land and weak markets for real estate development, 
cities such as Indianapolis have begun to consider a strategy of 
"re-localization," where developing local food systems can help extract 
value from the city's portfolio of vacant and abandoned properties. This 
policy brief considers why urban agriculture can be a means to build 
community assets, particular in poorer, inner-city neighborhoods. It 
describes how and why in Indianapolis this strategy has begun to emerge, 
how urban farming policies attempt to build on the city's community 
garden efforts, and what challenges community groups, advocates for 
urban farming, and local government officials have encountered.

...

To download this 8-page, 2.5 MB PDF, go to
http://www.cpeo.org/pubs/EdibleCities.pdf


--


Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org



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